Not All of Us Regularly Create Works of Art

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

Leonardo expresses the homo condition in a nutshell – indeed, his rendition of the womb resembles an opened horsechestnut casing. Inside is the beginning of us all laid bare. Five hundred years ago, this artist and scientist could portray the human being mystery with a wonder that is not religious simply biological he holds up humanity as a fact of nature. It is for me the most beautiful work of fine art in the world.
Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

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

Caravaggio shows a murderous moment in a prison yard. The executioner has drawn a knife to sever the last tendons and skin of John the Baptist'south neck. Someone watches this horrific moment from a barred window. All around is sepulchral gloom. Death and human cruelty are laid blank 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-ix)

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

Chauvet cave paintings (c xxx, 000 years agone)

Who painted these exquisitely lifelike portraits of animals? There was no such thing as writing in the ice age so nothing is known of the names, if they had names, of these early people. Cave artists may have been women; they may have been children. What is known is that Homo sapiens, our species of homo, makes its marker with these paintings that are equally cute and intelligent equally annihilation created since.
Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cavern, Ardèche, France

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

Jackson Pollock painting "One: Number 31". — Visitors at MoMA in New York stand before Jackson Pollock's 1: Number 31, 1950. Photograph: Alamy

The art of Jackson Pollock is a modern mystery. How, from flinging pigment on a sail laid on the footing, did he create such dazzler and inner structure? Similar a solo by Charlie Parker or Jimi Hendrix, his freeform improvisations loop and lurch and yet achieve a profound unity. Pollock only held this together for a short menstruation of brilliance. This painting is a cathedral of the listen.
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 male monarch and queen stand up where you are continuing, 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 bright mirror, the majestic reflection glows. This painting is a many-layered model of the world'southward strangeness.
Prado, Madrid

Picasso – Guernica (1937)

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

When Picasso started to paint his protest at the bombing of Guernica, the ancient Basque capital, by Hitler's air force on behalf of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, he was at the summit of his powers. 30 years later painting his subversive modernist grenade of a moving-picture show Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, his cubist intelligence was now enriched by the mythology and poetry unleashed by the surrealist movement. He also looked back to such historical paintings equally Raphael'south Fire in the Borgo equally he prepare downward the greatest human argument 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 merely 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 somewhen 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 option. The tragic power of these prisoners as they struggle to emerge out of raw stone is an expression of the man condition that equals Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Accademia Gallery, Florence

Parthenon Sculptures (447-442 BC)

Parthenon sculptures of Greece — Parthenon sculptures of Ancient Hellenic republic 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 ii centuries agone are best known today every bit objects of controversy – which is deplorable, because we should be marvelling at their genius. Most of the best ancient Greek sculpture is merely known through Roman copies. This is the greatest assembly 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 by Leonardo da Vinci. Artistically, beyond the squabbles, it doesn't go better than this.
British Museum, London