Painted straight onto walls and ceilings, so none of them can be moved, sold or rehung. Some are flaking; one was smashed to rubble on purpose.
1The Last SupperLeonardo's Milan refectory wall, painted in an experimental dry technique that started failing almost at once.
2The Sistine Chapel CeilingMichelangelo's four-year ceiling, more than 300 figures across 500 square metres.
3The Creation of AdamThe near-touching hands that became the most quoted image in Western art.
4The School of AthensRaphael's Vatican wall gathering every ancient philosopher into one hall.
5The Last JudgmentMichelangelo's altar wall, painted 25 years after the ceiling and censored within a generation.
6The Scrovegni ChapelGiotto's Padua cycle of 1305, where Western painting learns to show human feeling.
7Detroit Industry MuralsDiego Rivera's 27 panels of the River Rouge plant, painted for the Detroit Institute of Arts.
8The Allegory of Good and Bad GovernmentLorenzetti's 1339 Siena council-room walls, the first great secular fresco cycle.
9The Ajanta Caves paintingsBuddhist wall paintings cut into Indian rock from the second century BCE onward.
10Man at the CrossroadsRivera's Rockefeller Center mural, destroyed in 1934 after he refused to remove Lenin's face.
11The Triumph of DeathThe Palermo fresco of a skeletal horseman that Picasso studied before Guernica.
12The Cathedral of Florence dome frescoVasari and Zuccari's Last Judgment inside Brunelleschi's dome, the largest such surface in the world.
Comments 1
He would not work in true fresco, so The Last Supper began flaking in his own lifetime; the Sistine ceiling is still original paint: https://youpick.best/articles/leonardo-da-vinci-ranked-many-ways
YP
ypb-teamAug 21
