# What is the greatest mural or fresco ever painted?

> 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.

*By YPB Team · Published August 16, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-greatest-mural-or-fresco-ever-painted*

---

## Current results (0 votes)

1. **The Last Supper**
   Leonardo's Milan refectory wall, painted in an experimental dry technique that started failing almost at once.
2. **The Sistine Chapel Ceiling**
   Michelangelo's four-year ceiling, more than 300 figures across 500 square metres.
3. **The Creation of Adam**
   The near-touching hands that became the most quoted image in Western art.
4. **The School of Athens**
   Raphael's Vatican wall gathering every ancient philosopher into one hall.
5. **The Last Judgment**
   Michelangelo's altar wall, painted 25 years after the ceiling and censored within a generation.
6. **The Scrovegni Chapel**
   Giotto's Padua cycle of 1305, where Western painting learns to show human feeling.
7. **Detroit Industry Murals**
   Diego Rivera's 27 panels of the River Rouge plant, painted for the Detroit Institute of Arts.
8. **The Allegory of Good and Bad Government**
   Lorenzetti's 1339 Siena council-room walls, the first great secular fresco cycle.
9. **The Ajanta Caves paintings**
   Buddhist wall paintings cut into Indian rock from the second century BCE onward.
10. **Man at the Crossroads**
   Rivera's Rockefeller Center mural, destroyed in 1934 after he refused to remove Lenin's face.
11. **The Triumph of Death**
   The Palermo fresco of a skeletal horseman that Picasso studied before Guernica.
12. **The Cathedral of Florence dome fresco**
   Vasari and Zuccari's Last Judgment inside Brunelleschi's dome, the largest such surface in the world.

Tags: art, italy, frescoes