The original Renaissance Man, Leonardo is identified with genius, not only for masterpieces such as the Mona Lisa, The Last Supper and The Lady with an Ermine but also for his drawings of technologies that were five hundred years in the future.
Michelangelo was a triple threat: A painter , a sculptor and architect. Make that a quadruple threat since he also wrote poetry. Though he bounced between Florence, Bologna and Venice, his greatest commissions were for the Medici Popes in Rome. Aside from the aforementioned Sistine Ceiling, St. Peter's Basilica and Pietà, there was his tomb for Pope Julian II and the design for the Laurentian Library at at San Lorenzo's Church. Twenty years after painting the Sistine Ceiling, he returned to the Chapel to create one of the greatest frescoes of the Renaissance: The Last Judgment.
One the greatest artists in history, this Dutch Master is responsible for masterworks such as The Night Watch and Doctor Nicolaes Tulp's Demonstration of the Anatomy of the Arm. But he is particularly know for portraits in which he demonstrated an uncanny ability to evoke the innermost thoughts of his subjects (including himself through the play of facial expression and the fall of light across the sitter’s features.
Van Gogh is legendary for being mentally unstable (he did, after all, cut of part of his ear after an argument with fellow painter Paul Gauguin), but his paintings are among the most famous and beloved of all time. (His painting, The Starry Night, inspired a treacly Top 40 hit by Don McClean.) Van Gogh’s technique of painting with flurries of thick brushstrokes made up of bright colors squeezed straight from the tube would inspire subsequent generations of artists.
I scream, you scream we all scream for Munch’s The Scream, the Mona Lisa of anxiety. In 2012, a pastel version of Edvard Munch’s iconic evocation of modern angst fetched a then-astronomical price of $120 million at auction (a benchmark which has since been bested several times). Munch’s career was more than just a single painting. He’s generally acknowledged as the precursor to Expressionism, influencing artists such 20th-century artists as Egon Schiele, Erich Heckel and Max Beckmann.
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