Top 5 Works of Art — All Time!
Definitive. Objective. Final.
There are no winners in such a game of superlatives. Well, except the 5 artists I select for this incontrovertible and universally accepted and totally comprehensive list.
#1. Kouros. 6th c. BC.
I know, you’re supposed to start with number 5. But we’re rule-breaking here. Also, this isn’t an artist but a form. So for thousands of years, Egypt made these:
Then Greece[1] came along, copied them at first, then whammo:
Removed the clothes (aesthetic innovation) and removed the bracket/brace (engineering innovation). Both were largely unique on earth. Of course, it was life-sized too. Egypt never did (and would never do) something similar. The aesthetic and engineering innovations of the kouros represents the invention of Europe. It was the original “one small step for man” … one small step for Greece, one giant leap for art.
(FYI there are many kouroi — the Met in NYC has a nice one and various museums in Greece generally all have a few.)
#2. Praxiteles. Aphrodite. 4th c. BC. Athens.
So the folks on the island of Kos, an Aegean island near modern-day Turkey[2], got a little money (generally through shipping and import/export — those Aegean islands produced and shipped olive oil, basil, wine and clay/clay manufactures all over, particularly with Egypt). So these nouveau-riche wanted something to demonstrate their wealth and sophistication, and the called up Praxiteles –Athens’ most badass artist. Convo went something like:
And this is what Praxiteles came up with:
A life-sized naked woman? Completely unheard of … convo probably went like this:
Aphrodite is the first life-sized naked woman in art. And of course, the most widely copied work of art. (And yes, Phrene, a prostitute, was probably the model. Eh, everyone in Athens loved Phrene, though she was charged with corrupting the youth. Found not-guilty, fyi.)
When I say everyone throughout history copied Aphrodite, I do mean everyone.
Folks of Kos sent Aphrodite on to Knidos, and she became ridiculously famous. The City of Knidos put her on their money, and eventually Kos offered an enormous sum to buy her back — Knidos was in debt and really needed the money, but they turned Kos down. Aphrodite was placed in her own temple with the doors locked at night to stop the young boys from breaking in (seriously, that happened).
In some ways, Aphrodite should be first on this list, but she wouldn’t have been possible without the kouroi who came before her.
There are no known indisputable works of Praxiteles though many sculptures are suspected to be his; Aphrodite disappeared from Knidos millennia ago.
3. Vermeer. Portrait of a Young Woman. 1665. Delft.
So it was the Greeks with their kouroi and Praxiteles with his Aphrodite who invented Europe, but it was the northern Europeans who invented the modern world. Starting with Jan van Eyck and his boy Petrus Christus in the 15th century, they produced such unique works as Portrait of a Young Girl.
That’s Anne Talbot.[3] She’s twenty-three years old, the eldest of seven, and grew up near the woods of Nottingham forest outside of Sheffield, England. Her father, John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, was hacked to death a few years earlier by the Yorkists outside of King Henry’s tent; Henry was captured, and the War of Roses continued. Anne sat for her portrait while visiting Bruges (now part of Belgium) for a wedding. The Duke of Burgundy was marrying the sister of Anne’s King. That king was Edward, the first Yorkist king and the leader of the small group who killed her father.
What’s remarkable about the painting isn’t the hat, though it is remarkable for its muted sophistication; it was the original chic, so much so that art historians cannot quite date it and just a few decades later the Italian owners of the portrait assumed the woman was French — an early example of a presumption of French fashionableness. Most startling about the hat is the chinstrap; this was not something woman wore. Anne is being exceptionally bold by wearing a remarkable muted feminine hat with a male attachment. The chin strap is a conspicuous mark of rebellion.
Anne’s dress isn’t remarkable either; not exactly standard but nothing unusual. Her hairline — plucked or shaved like her eyebrows — was also standard. But noticeably unusual is that Anne is in a common room, as if she just walked into an average sitting room and sat down. Her dress communicates wealth, the chinstrap rejects convention, and the dingy room mocks social expectations.
Unmarried good women of Anne’s time and place didn’t look directly at the viewer; it was impolite and suggestive. Yet here is unmarried Anne looking right at you, and she knows you’re looking at her. One can find portraits of a person looking at you, but that person is often Jesus Christ, son of God. Anne wasn’t the son of anyone. She is the daughter of the recently deceased Earl of Sheffield and present subject of her father’s killer. Anne fights back the only way she can — mildly annoyed, man’s chin strap, dingy room — by transforming into an individual and transforming the resulting agency into a response.
Anne Talbot, and not the Mona Lisa four decades later, is the first portrait of an individual in full. She’s not praying or bowing or supplicating or commemorating. There is nothing to this painting except for a young woman looking straight at the viewer. Jesus looks straight at the viewer in recognition of your soul; Anne is recognizing her own, and the Reformation thundered in the distance.
Eyck and Petrus Christus started the revolution; Vermeer finished it off. Done. World changed. Modernity is coming and you can’t stop it. This 15-year-old girl is just letting you know.
This is known as Portrait of a Young Woman, which is a dumb title because (1) artists of this time generally didn’t title their paintings; some numbnut probate lawyer titled this one; (2) Christus’ “young girl” is 23 whereas Vermeer’s “young woman” is probably 15, maybe 12.
Anyway, you don’t look at this painting. It looks at you.[4]
4. Cloisters Cross. 12th c. England.
If Dan Brown (Da Vince Code) knew anything about art — really, anything — he would have written about the Cloisters Cross. Imagine a work so controversial that the Met sued to keep a book about it from being published — a book written by the director of Met, no less. Imagine a work so controversial that while once considered the greatest work of English art, it’s currently kept in a basement in Harlem. Imagine a work so perfect in its artistic execution that the ‘experts’ routinely doubted whether it’s real, or correctly dated, or from the country it’s claimed to be from (no way the English could have produced something like this.) Imagine a work so important that when revealed to the public (though kept in a basement in Switzerland at the time), the U.K. Parliament raced to raise the money to buy it as a national treasure, only for some to hesitate because something this wondrous couldn’t possibly be real. (Parliament stumbled; Hoving, the future Met director, swooped in.)
You can’t see the back, but it gets better.
Probably 12th century. Probably Bury St. Edmunds, England’s wealthiest monastery. Possibly Master Hugo, who also created the renowned Bury St. Edmunds Bronze Doors. It is walrus bone. Pretty much all we know for certain.
Was this the Crusader’s Cross? How did it end up in Hungary? Was it used to pay a King’s ransom in Germany? Did it precede the great army of Richard the Lionhearted to the Holy Land? What exactly is the story it tells on the back? Who commissioned it? There are many guesses and few definitive answers. What we do know it that it’s one of art’s greatest mysteries and the life’s work of an extremely talented artist.
5. El Greco. Christ on the Cross Adored by Two Donors. 1590. Toledo.
I’m not done tooling on the French. The Louvre will tell you that their greatest works are the Mona Lisa (Italian) and the Venus de Milo (Roman copy of Greek statue), but really the Louvre’s greatest work hangs in the Spanish gallery and was painted by a Greek (Doménikos Theotokópoulos … now you know why they just called him El Greco.)
This is all so funny because the Louvre is a national museum, which means its purpose is to collect and curate French art. Oh well.
El Greco painted many versions of Christ on the Cross — the Getty has one and the Tokyo museum has one. Here are two exercises that reveal the awesome breadth of El Greco’s vision.
#1. Go to a museum that has a late-16th/early 17th century Spanish room and look around (there are several museums that have such rooms). You’ll see several fairly standard paintings for the period, and then you see El Greco. He was totally out of his time. He out-Cezanned Cezanne three centuries in advance. Look at his Toledo landscape — the late 19th century French painters tried desperately to achieve that pungent motion and emotive light with their paint.
#2. Now, go to a museum that has a collection of El Greco’s work across his life (as far as I know, one doesn’t exist … exhibits like this come around every 20–30 years). What you’ll see is an artist who lived but 72 years and yet whose work spanned two millennia of expression. El Greco started painting as an iconographer — old school Byzantine style. Then painted in something of a northern Italian/Venetian style via Tintoretto and Titian. Then he moved to Toledo (Spain not Ohio), dropped a metric long-ton of acid, and summoned all he knew about paining. A critic once complained that Van Gogh “saw too little,” to which the response was “no, he saw too much.” El Greco was an artist who saw too much.
So yeah, how about this:
That’s El Greco. Then, he did this:
Ok, Picasso did that, but (1) it’s the painting that launched cubism and (2) Picasso said he was inspired by:
And by “inspired” I mean he sat in front of El Greco’s painting for days, copying it — the composition, the movement … Picasso’s friend owned the painting so he sat in front of it for as long as he wanted. Picasso said that he saw that El Greco and his brain went haywire, then he painted The Whores. (Ok, it’s officially called Les Demoiselles d’Avignon but Picasso never gave it that title, a poet did; Picasso preferred to call it mon bordel — my brothel — because Picasso liked his naughty pictures to have naughty names.) Picasso said he wanted his bordel to have a savage forge. You want savage force? Here’s Toledo:
Talk about a savage force. And that was painted around 1598. Now go back and look as the Dormition of the Virgin above. By shear magnitude of genius, El Greco skipped across thousands of years of art.
Keep in mind that El Greco precedes Vermeer by about four decades. While Vermeer painted this powerful-yet-delicate new thing called the individual, El Greco painted the universe.
Honorable Mentions
Turner. You want light? You want light in motion? The French Impressionists were just Walmart versions of Turner. Light, motion, drama … Turner was the master.
Alexander the Great. No one brought more art to the world than he did. The Greeks mastered aesthetics; Alexander distributed it across continents. Importantly, the idea of the life-size human representation? All Greek. All Alexander. The world thanks you.
Duchamp. Saw the end of art as art and delivered a hardware-store-bought toilet to an exhibit (seriously). Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors is the Cloisters Cross of modernity. Dali took on the challenge, but Duchamp should get credit for pushing the panic button. Or flushing the toilet.
Laocoön and His Sons. Artist unknown. Date unknown. Greek. Currently in the Vatican. Regarding this statue, Pliny the Elder wrote “holy shit.” Indeed, Pliny. Indeed. Like the Cloisters Cross, Laocoön is a masterwork whose execution is almost unbelievable. If you ever want to feel as though you’re doing nothing with your life, consider that some dude and his pals made that with a few mallets and chisels. Holy shit.
[1] Fun fact: “Greece” dates only the 19th century. There is no “ancient Greece,” though there are “ancient Greeks,” who were invented by the Romans — pretty much the only thing they invented (shots fired). But the Greeks’ only consistent relationship to each other is that they generally spoke the same language. Culturally and in every other way, “ancient Greeks” had little in common with each other. Greek scholars who make an observation about Athenians and then extrapolate across “ancient Greek” should be shot.
[2] Of course there is no “ancient Turkey” — Turkey dates from the 1920s (more or less), and the Ottomans before from the 15th c. What is currently the western Turkish mainland was all Greek in ancient times.
[3] Yes, you’ve seen her before. https://medium.com/@nathan.a.allen/new-book-may-d4d436ceca2d
[4] Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was done in between these two paintings. You’ve heard of it for the same reason you’ve heard of the Venus de Milo (the Louvre’s Aphrodite copy) — the French are terrific at PR. Neither of these works are the best of their kind.
About Nathan Allen
Formerly of Xio Research, an A.I. appliance company. Previously a strategy and development leader at IBM Watson Education. His views do not necessarily reflect anyone’s, including his own. (What.) Nathan’s academic training is in intellectual history; his next book, Weapon of Choice, examines the creation of American identity and modern Western power. Don’t get too excited, Weapon of Choice isn’t about wars but rather more about the seeming ex nihilo development of individual agency … which doesn’t really seem sexy until you consider that individual agency covers everything from voting rights to the cash in your wallet to the reason mass communication even makes sense….Weapon of Choice comes out in May (https://medium.com/@nathan.a.allen/new-book-may-d4d436ceca2d).
