This painting was once part of a large altarpiece which stood behind the high altar in a church in Florence. It shows the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, being crowned Queen of Heaven by her son. The two main figures are larger than all the surrounding ones, even though they are further than some from the viewer. Around Jesus and Mary stand or kneel 48 saints; and in the bottom middle foreground a group of angels sing and play musical instruments including a portative organ (the angel on the far left) and bagpipes. The faces of the saints are more or less identical, but some of them can be identified by the objects they are holding, or by the clothes they are wearing: so St John the Baptist (right, second row from bottom, closest to throne) wears an animal skin under his blue cloak. This reminds us that he spent time in the desert and used animal skins for clothes. St Catherine (right, front row, last figure on the right) rests her hand on the wheel on which, according to the legend, she was about to be tortured before she was miraculously rescued. Apart from the throne there is little suggestion of three-dimensional space. The artist seems to have been more concerned to create a lavish impression, with many figures and rich colours such as gold leaf and ultramarine blue.

Jacopo di Cione (active 1368, died c. 1399)

Jacopo di Cione was the youngest of four brothers, three of whom were also painters. Their workshops in Florence produced large numbers of paintings in the second half of the fourteenth century.

Title: The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius
Artist: Crivelli
Medium: egg and oil on canvas
Date: 1486

This painting shows the story of the Annunciation (Luke, 1). The Virgin Mary is visited by the archangel Gabriel, who tells her that she is to be the mother of Jesus. Crivelli has shown the scene taking place in Mary’s home, but he has included the town around her home as well. He has updated the story and set it in a Renaissance town with fashionable new buildings: the ornaments in relief on Mary’s house were copied from the ancient Romans. This picture would also have seemed modern because of the convincing way Crivelli has represented three-dimensional space, which few artists had mastered as skilfully as he. The lines made by the buildings and the tiled pavement all meet at the vanishing point: the red hat on the man in front of the grill in the city wall in the distance. The painting was commissioned for a church in an Italian city that had recently received some good news (it had been given more freedom to govern itself). This idea is developed in the painting. Good news is being delivered to Mary by an angel in the foreground, while on the bridge at the back, a man in a black hat reads a letter which seems to have been delivered by another winged messenger, a carrier pigeon, now in its cage next to the smaller man in brown.

Carlo Crivelli (c. 1433 – c. 1494)

Crivelli was the son of a painter and was born in Venice, but spent most of his career working away form Venice, after he had been sentenced to imprisonment for adultery with a sailor’s wife.

Title: The Supper at Emmaus
Artist: Caravaggio
Medium: oil and egg on canvas
Date: 1601

This painting shows a moment in a story from the New Testament (Luke, 24:13–32). After Jesus had died on the cross, two of his disciples were travelling from Jerusalem to the town of Emmaus. They met a stranger on the road, started up a conversation with him and invited him to supper at an inn. As they were about to start the meal, the stranger blessed the bread and the two disciples recognised Jesus, risen from the dead. Caravaggio has chosen the most dramatic moment in the story, the moment when the two disciples realise they are looking at the man whom they had seen die on the cross only days before. He makes it even more dramatic by using strong contrasts of dark and light, and by foreshortening the outsretched hands of Jesus and the disciple on the right. The basket of fruit balances impossibly on the edge of the table, as if at any second it will tip over and crash out of the picture into our space.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610)

Caravaggio was probably born in Milan. He worked in Rome, where he was commissioned to paint several important altarpieces. In 1606 he killed a man in a duel and was forced to leave Rome. He travelled to Naples, Malta and Sicily, and died of a fever while returning to Rome. He is best known for his illusionistic still lives, his homoerotic paintings of young boys dressed as Eros or Bacchus, and religious works in which dark settings frame figures where important details are highlighted (such as the expressions of the disciples in The Supper at Emmaus). His style influenced many of his contemporaries as well as later artists including Wright of Derby.

Title: An Autumn Landscape With a View of Het Steen
Artist: Rubens
Medium: oil on wood
Date: probably 1636

Rubens was a highly successful artist who worked for many of Europe’s royal and noble families. With the money he earned he was able to buy a large house in Antwerp and a country house outside the city. Het Steen was a large castle-like house with a moat and surrounding land, and Rubens spent much time there during the last few years of his life when his health became poor. Rubens has painted this house on the left, its entrance lit up by the early-morning sun. To the left of the door is a group of well-dressed people: perhaps the artist is among them.

This painting shows an early-morning scene at the end of summer; a couple on the left seem to be setting off for market, while a hunter with his dog stalks partridges in the foreground. But the viewer is led past the partridges, across a little footbridge, and along a line of trees which sweeps round to the distant horizon. Here space is not created by lines leading to a single vanishing point, but through Rubens’ use of colour: the further away an object is from the viewer, the less intense its colour becomes, and by the time our eyes reach the horizon, everything looks a bluish grey. Outlines become less distinct. This is caused by the atmosphere in between the viewer and the view; hence the technique is known as ‘aerial perspective’.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640)

Rubens was born in Germany and trained in his parents’ native city of Antwerp. Like many artists from northern Europe, he travelled to Italy to work (he was in the service of the duke of Mantua) and to see the works of the great artists of the Renaissance such as Michaelangelo. On his return he set up a busy studio in Antwerp. As well as being a highly successful painter, Rubens sometimes worked as a diplomat for various royal and noble families; he was also an art collector and scholar.

Title: The Avenue at Middelharnis
Artist: Hobbema
Medium: oil on canvas
Date: 1689

This is one of the best-known Dutch landscape paintings. It shows an actual seventeenth-century view which has hardly changed today: the road leading to the town of Middleharnis on the island of Over Flakee in south Holland. What makes it special is the dramatic viewpoint the artist has selected. The avenue is placed almost dead centre, leading us directly to the horizon where the main buildings in the town, the church and town hall, are clearly visible. The line of poplar trees convincingly links the foreground and background with an illusion of depth. The height of the poplars is exaggerated by the low horizon.

The painting also gives us an idea of the Dutch people’s need to control the forces of nature in a country where much of the land is below sea level: a ditch has been dug around the decorative fruit trees which are being pruned in the right foreground. We know that the sea is nearby because ships’ masts are visible on the horizon.

Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709)

Hobbema was born in Amsterdam and spent his life there. He painted landscapes: usually woods with sunlit clearings; The Avenue at Middelharnis is not a typical example of his work. At the age of about 30, Hobbema gave up painting professionally and became a wine gauger for the Amsterdam wine-importers’ association. However, The Avenue was painted 20 years after this, which shows that Hobbema kept up his skills and also his willingness to experiment with different types of view.

Title: Rain, Steam and Speed: The Great Western Railway
Artist: Turner
Medium: oil on canvas
Date: before 1844

A steam train crosses a bridge in the rain. The bridge was designed by the engineer Brunel and completed in 1839. It crosses the Thames between Taplow and Maidenhead. On the tracks in front of the train a tiny hare dashes for cover, and on the right a ploughman works in the field with a horse-drawn plough. There is a small boat on the river on the left. The dramatic perspective of the railway line and the blurred image of the coaches behind the engine suggest that the train is travelling at great speed and is about to rush out of the painting. (In fact, trains on this railway at this time would have travelled at an average speed of 33 mph.)

The painting may have been made after Turner himself had travelled on a steam train during a storm. In any case, in the early 1840s the railways were still something to be marvelled at, and the choice of this subject was a new and exciting one. The title, which is Turner’s own, refers to the rain (which sweeps across the front of the picture from right to left), the steam (partly from the train, partly from the misty weather), and the speed (perhaps not only the speed of the man-made train but also the natural speed of the hare).

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851)

Even as a child Turner was a talented artist. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from the age of 15, and became the youngest-ever Academician in 1802. He travelled in Britain and Europe, looking for dramatic views, and is especially well known for his colourful landscapes and seascapes. Many of these were quite different from paintings of similar subjects by his contemporaries, and he was seen as a daring modern artist in his lifetime. He left his paintings to the nation, and a large number of them are in the Tate Gallery in London.

Title: Sunflowers
Artist: Van Gogh
Medium: oil on canvas
Date: 1888

In the summer of 1888 van Gogh was living in Arles in the south of France, where he painted a group of four canvases of sunflowers as decorations for his home (the so-called ‘Yellow House’). The one in the National Gallery was hung in the guest bedroom at Arles which Van Gogh prepared for the painter Gauguin who came to stay with him between October and December 1888. Gauguin painted Van Gogh painting sunflowers; this work and Van Gogh’s painting of the ‘Yellow House’ can be seen in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdan. For Van Gogh the colour yellow was the colour of hope and friendship; but sadly his friendship with Gauguin, whom he greatly admired, did not last. The two quarrelled; Van Gogh suffered a nervous collapse and famously cut off a small part of his ear.

Van Gogh has painted 15 sunflowers at different stages of flowering – quite a few are dead. This may have had the symbolic meaning that all living things come to an end, although the seeds contained in the flower heads suggest that new life is also present. There are no shadows, and the only modelling on the vase is a blob of white paint: a suggestion of a highlight. But the painting does not look flat because he has given depth in the paint itself – it is almost as if he is modelling in paint.

Vincent van Gogh (18531890)

Van Gogh was born in Holland and was an art dealer in The Hague, London and Paris. He spent a brief period as a preacher and moved to Paris in 1886. During and after his visit to Arles in 1888, he suffered from mental illness, and he was admitted to the asylum in the town of St-Rémy. He then moved to Auvers-sur-Oise, where he committed suicide.