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Art Guides · Renaissance
The 10 Most Famous Renaissance Paintings
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Log in or sign upTwo hundred years of Renaissance painting gave us thousands of masterpieces, but a handful are the ones the whole world keeps looking up. This guide explores ten famous Renaissance paintings, selected using October 2026 search estimates and our catalogue, from a smile in Paris to a mirror in London, and for each one we tell you what you are looking at, why it matters and where to see it.
Four of them are by one man. Start with the top three, or read the whole list below.
1. Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
Explore the artistLeonardo da Vinci →She is a Florentine silk merchant's wife, Lisa Gherardini, and the portrait was a commission Leonardo never handed over. He carried it with him to Milan, Rome and finally France, adding thin glazes for some sixteen years. That is where the softness comes from: no hard outlines anywhere, just shadow melting into shadow, so the corners of her mouth seem to move as you look.
For three centuries it was simply a fine painting in the French royal collection. Then, in August 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian glazier who had worked at the Louvre, walked out with it under his smock. The theft drew international attention. When it returned in 1913, its fame had expanded far beyond the museum.
Read the full story of the Mona Lisa
Collection reference: Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, painted by hand
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2. The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci
Explore the artistLeonardo da Vinci →
Leonardo painted it on the wall of a monastery dining room, so the monks ate their meals beneath it. He chose the second after Christ says "one of you will betray me", and every apostle reacts at once: arms thrown up, faces turned, questions on every lip. Judas is the only one leaning back into shadow, clutching his money bag.
The trouble is the paint. Fresco requires painting into wet plaster. Leonardo instead used a dry-wall technique that allowed slower adjustments and layers of colour. It began flaking within his lifetime. Monks later cut a door through Christ's feet, and in 1943 a bomb destroyed the room around it. The sandbagged wall survived, and a twenty-year restoration finished in 1999.
Read the full story of The Last Supper
Collection reference: Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano, Milan.
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The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 3. The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo
Explore the artistMichelangelo →
Michelangelo did not want the job. He was a sculptor, he told the Pope, not a painter. He spent four years on scaffolding sixty feet up, painting more than three hundred figures across the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and wrote a bitter little poem about the paint dripping onto his face.
This is the scene everyone knows. Adam lies on the bare earth, already perfect but not yet alive. God rushes toward him wrapped in a red cloak full of angels, and the spark is about to jump the gap. In 1990 a doctor pointed out that the cloak is shaped almost exactly like a human brain, a theory that still divides historians and delights everyone else.
Read the full story of The Creation of Adam
Collection reference: Vatican Museums: The Creation of Adam.
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The Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, painted by hand
Michelangelo · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 4. The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch
Explore the artistHieronymus Bosch →
While Italy was painting saints and philosophers, a Dutchman in the small town of 's-Hertogenbosch painted this. Read it left to right: God introduces Adam to Eve in a calm Eden, then a vast garden fills with hundreds of naked people riding birds, eating giant strawberries and climbing into shells, and finally everything turns to ice, fire and musical instruments used as torture.
Nobody knows exactly what Bosch meant, and that is half the fun. Its tiny scenes reward prolonged looking. One damned soul in the hell panel has a line of music painted on his backside; in 2014 a student transcribed it and recorded it, and the "butt song" from five hundred years ago went viral.
Collection reference: Museo del Prado, Madrid.
OWN IT.The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, painted by hand $3,299.00
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The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, painted by hand
Hieronymus Bosch · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 5. The School of Athens by Raphael
Explore the artistRaphael →
Raphael was twenty-six when the Pope gave him the walls of his private library, and he filled one of them with every great thinker of the ancient world, gathered under one roof. At the centre walk the two who argued most: Plato, pointing to heaven, and his student Aristotle, palm turned down to the earth.
Raphael borrowed faces from his own time. Plato looks like the old Leonardo da Vinci. The brooding man on the steps, writing alone, was added late and looks like Michelangelo, who was painting the Sistine ceiling a few rooms away. And near the right edge one young man in a dark cap looks straight out at us. That is Raphael himself.
Read the full story of The School of Athens
Collection reference: Vatican Museums: The School of Athens.
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The School of Athens by Raphael, painted by hand
Raphael Sanzio · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 6. The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli
Explore the artistSandro Botticelli →
Botticelli gives an ancient goddess the scale and presence of a major Florentine painting. Venus stands on a scallop shell as the winds carry her toward shore. It was one of the first great paintings on canvas in Florence, and it still has the cool, pale light of tempera, made with egg.
Look closely and the anatomy is impossible: her neck is too long, her left shoulder drops at an angle no body could hold, and she could never stand on that shell. Botticelli did not care. He wanted grace, not accuracy, and the result is the face that launched a thousand perfume adverts.
Read the full story of The Birth of Venus
Collection reference: Uffizi Galleries, Florence.
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The Birth of Venus by Botticelli, painted by hand
Sandro Botticelli · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 7. Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci
Explore the artistLeonardo da Vinci →
It is the only painting on this list that most people know for its price. In 1958 it sold at auction for £45 as the work of a follower. Cleaned and restored, it reappeared in 2011 as a lost Leonardo, and in November 2017 it sold at Christie's for $450.3 million, the most ever paid for a painting.
Then it vanished. It has not been shown in public since, and experts still argue about how much of it Leonardo actually painted. Even the orb raises questions. Its transparency has prompted different interpretations of the object’s material and Leonardo’s handling of light; it is not a simple test that settles the attribution.
Read the full story of Salvator Mundi
Catalogue reference: Christie’s: 2017 Salvator Mundi catalogue.
OWN IT.Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, painted by hand $299.00
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Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 8. The Last Judgment by Michelangelo
Explore the artistMichelangelo →
Twenty-five years after the ceiling, Michelangelo came back to the Sistine Chapel, now in his sixties, and covered the whole altar wall with the end of the world. A muscular Christ raises his arm and the bodies around him start to move, the saved pulled up into the sky, the damned dragged down to the boat of Charon.
According to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo gave the figure of Minos the likeness of Biagio da Cesena, a court official who criticised the nudity. The story is an anecdote about the fresco’s reception, rather than proof of the artist’s intentions. And Saint Bartholomew holds up his own flayed skin, which carries a sagging portrait of Michelangelo himself. After his death the nudes were covered with painted cloth, and the painter who did it was nicknamed "the breeches maker".
Collection reference: Vatican Museums: The Last Judgement.
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The Last Judgement, painted by hand
Michelangelo · oil on canvas, made to order
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 9. Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci
Explore the artistLeonardo da Vinci →
Another Leonardo portrait on this list shows how he could make a sitter seem caught in a living moment. The sitter is Cecilia Gallerani, a gifted sixteen-year-old at the court of Milan and the companion of its ruler, Ludovico Sforza. Instead of posing her stiffly in profile, as many formal portraits did, Leonardo turned her body one way and her head the other, as if she has just heard someone come in.
The animal is a riddle. The Greek word for ermine sounds like her surname, and Ludovico himself was nicknamed the White Ermine, so the creature in her arms is both her and him. During the Second World War the painting was looted by the Nazis and ended up in the residence of the governor of occupied Poland, and it came home to Kraków in 1946.
Read the full story of Lady with an Ermine
Collection reference: National Museum in Kraków: Czartoryski collection.
OWN IT.Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci, painted by hand $299.00
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Lady with an Ermine by Leonardo da Vinci, painted by hand
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Real paintings, real brushworkSee what arrives at your doorBrowse all samples → 10. The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck
Explore the artistJan van Eyck →
The oldest painting on the list comes from Bruges, not Italy, and it shows what the Northern Renaissance could do with oil paint. An Italian merchant and a woman in a green dress stand hand in hand in a richly furnished domestic room. Every surface is real enough to touch: the fur, the brass chandelier, the oranges on the windowsill, the little dog.
Then look at the round mirror on the back wall. It reflects the whole room from behind, including two tiny figures standing in the doorway where we are. Above it, in elegant script, the painter signed the wall itself: "Jan van Eyck was here, 1434". Whether we are watching a wedding, a memorial or simply a rich man showing off is still debated.
Read the full story of The Arnolfini Portrait
Collection reference: National Gallery, London.
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The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck, painted by hand
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Questions people ask
What is the most famous Renaissance painting?
The Mona Lisa is among the most widely recognised Renaissance paintings. Leonardo’s The Last Supper and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam are also defining works.
What makes a painting Renaissance?
Renaissance painters rediscovered the art of ancient Greece and Rome and studied the real world closely. Look for linear perspective that makes walls and floors recede, bodies with real weight and anatomy, soft light and shadow, and classical myths painted alongside Bible stories.
Who are the three great masters of the High Renaissance?
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael. They worked at the same time, knew each other's work, and between them painted seven of the ten pictures on this list.
When was the Renaissance?
Roughly from the early 1400s to the late 1500s. It began in Florence, spread to Rome and Venice, and had its own northern version in the Netherlands and Germany, where painters like Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch worked.
Can I see these paintings in person?
Nine of the ten, yes: in Paris, Milan, the Vatican, Madrid, Florence, Kraków and London. Salvator Mundi is in a private collection and has not been shown since 2017. All ten are available from us as hand-painted oil reproductions.
Explore more works in our Renaissance collection. Museum and catalogue records are linked beside each painting above.
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- Musée du Louvre, Santa Maria delle Grazie, the Vatican Museums, Museo del Prado, the Uffizi Gallery, the Czartoryski Museum and the National Gallery, London: collection records for the paintings above.
- Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550 and 1568).
- Frank Lynn Meshberger, "An Interpretation of Michelangelo's Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy", JAMA, 1990.
- Christie's, Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale, New York, 15 November 2017 (Salvator Mundi).
- The full stories, with their sources, are linked under each painting where we have written them.
Ranking follows monthly US Google search volume for each painting's name (OpenSEO, October 2026). The School of Athens has no published figure, so it is placed by its Wikipedia readership. Lady with an Ermine and The Arnolfini Portrait are tied. We do not publish the figures.
