What Famous Work of Art Is Not a Painting

Leonardo da Vinci – The Foetus in the Womb (c 1510-13)

Leonardo expresses the human condition in a nutshell – indeed, his rendition of the womb resembles an opened horsechestnut casing. Inside is the beginning of us all laid blank. Five hundred years ago, this creative person and scientist could portray the homo mystery with a wonder that is not religious just biological he holds upward humanity equally a fact of nature. Information technology is for me the most cute work of art in the globe.
Imperial Collection, Windsor Castle

Caravaggio – The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (1608)

Caravaggio shows a murderous moment in a prison house m. The executioner has drawn a knife to sever the terminal tendons and skin of John the Baptist's neck. Someone watches this horrific moment from a barred window. All around is sepulchral gloom. Death and human cruelty are laid bare by this masterpiece, as its calibration and shadow daunt and possess the heed.
St John's Co-Cathedral, Valletta, Malta

Rembrandt – Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c 1665-9)

You are not looking at Rembrandt. He is looking at yous. The authorisation of genius and historic period gaze out of this autumnal masterpiece with a moral scrutiny that is terrifying. Rembrandt seems to run into into the beholder's soul and perceive every failing. He is like God. He is the most serious creative person of all, considering he makes anybody who stands before him a supplicant in the court of truth.
Kenwood House, London

Chauvet cave paintings (c thirty, 000 years ago)

Who painted these exquisitely lifelike portraits of animals? There was no such thing every bit writing in the ice age and then zip is known of the names, if they had names, of these early people. Cave artists may accept been women; they may have been children. What is known is that Human sapiens, our species of human, makes its marker with these paintings that are every bit cute and intelligent as annihilation created since.
Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cavern, Ardèche, France

Jackson Pollock – One: Number 31, 1950 (1950)

Jackson Pollock painting "One: Number 31". — Visitors at MoMA in New York stand before Jackson Pollock's One: Number 31, 1950. Photo: Alamy

The fine art of Jackson Pollock is a modern mystery. How, from flinging paint on a sail laid on the ground, did he create such beauty and inner structure? Like a solo past Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix, his freeform improvisations loop and lurch and yet accomplish a profound unity. Pollock only held this together for a short period of brilliance. This painting is a cathedral of the mind.
MoMA, New York

Velázquez – Las Meninas (c 1656)

Las Meninas by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez — Velazquez's Las Meninas. Photograph: The Gallery Collection/Corbis

The king and queen stand where you are standing, in front of a gathering of courtiers. Velazquez looks from the portrait he is painting of the imperial couple. The infanta and her retinue of maids (meninas) and dwarf entertainers are gathered before the monarch. In the distance, a minister or messenger is at the door. In a vivid mirror, the royal reflection glows. This painting is a many-layered model of the globe's strangeness.
Prado, Madrid

Picasso – Guernica (1937)

The Guernica — Picasso's Guernica at Reina Sofia museum, Madrid. Photograph: Alamy

When Picasso started to pigment his protest at the bombing of Guernica, the ancient Basque capital, past Hitler's air force on behalf of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, he was at the height of his powers. Thirty years after painting his subversive modernist grenade of a moving picture Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his cubist intelligence was now enriched by the mythology and poesy unleashed by the surrealist movement. He as well looked back to such historical paintings as Raphael's Burn in the Borgo equally he fix down the greatest human statement of the 20th century.
Reina Sofia, Madrid

Michelangelo – Prisoners (c 1519-34)

Bearded Slave by Michelangelo — Michelangelo, Prisoners, or Slaves. Photograph: George Tatge/CORBIS

Michelangelo's Prisoners, or Slaves, were begun for the tomb of Pope Julius II only never finished. In its entirety – including the Dying and Rebellious Slaves in the Louvre and the statue of Moses on the final, reduced version of the tomb eventually erected in Rome – this constitutes the greatest unfinished masterpiece in the world. Yet Michelangelo did non exit things unfinished out of laziness. It is an artful choice. The tragic ability of these prisoners equally they struggle to emerge out of raw stone is an expression of the human condition that equals Shakespeare'due south Hamlet.
Accademia Gallery, Florence

Parthenon Sculptures (447-442 BC)

Parthenon sculptures of Greece — Parthenon sculptures of Aboriginal Greece in situ at the British Museum in London. Photograph: In Pictures/Corbis

The long marble frieze, jumbo broken statues of reclining gods, and frenzied carvings of centaurs fighting humans that Lord Elgin removed from the Athenian Acropolis two centuries ago are best known today every bit objects of controversy – which is sad, because we should be marvelling at their genius. Most of the all-time ancient Greek sculpture is only known through Roman copies. This is the greatest associates anywhere of the real thing: the very art that created the idea of the "classic". Gaze on the lowing heifer that inspired Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn and the goddesses whose robes uncannily resemble pictures past Leonardo da Vinci. Artistically, beyond the squabbles, it doesn't go better than this.
British Museum, London