The artwork archive
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Artist: Benjamin Robert Haydon
A horseman throws himself into a dark chasm, his white horse rearing above the void. The scene is ancient Roman legend, painted by the nineteenth-century British history painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, a man whose own life ended in catastrophe. This draft explores the painting's visible drama and the story it tells, and asks what it means when an artist's subject echoes his own fate.
Artist: Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo da Vinci painted The Last Supper in Milan between 1495 and 1498, and the official Museo del Cenacolo Vinciano identifies it as his work. This short tour sets the biblical subject and then follows the museum's own evidence about the painting's making and its present fragility, keeping the limits of the record in view.
Artist: Edvard Munch
Edvard Munch's The Dance of Life sets three women at different stages of love against a moonlit shore. This docent tour explains the symbolic cycle Munch built from the figures, their colours and their placement.
Artist: Thutmose (attributed by source)
A painted limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti, Great Royal Wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten, attributed to the sculptor Thutmose and dated around 1345 BC during Egypt's Amarna Period. The identification rests on the supplied Wikimedia Commons description, which serves as a discovery aid rather than an official museum record, so confidence is medium.
Artist: Rembrandt van Rijn
Rembrandt's civic guard portrait shows a company of Amsterdam militia getting into formation to march, not sitting for the record. The captain in black gives the order, his lieutenant steps forward, and the light picks out the gesture that starts the whole scene moving.
Artist: Michelangelo
A docent's reading of Michelangelo's marble Pietà, made about 1499 and now in St. Peter's Basilica, Vatican City. The account draws on the supplied institutional record for subject, identity, material and collection, and is explicit about where evidence is thin.
Showing 19 to 24 of 60 artworks.