From Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper to Rembrandt's The Night Watch, the art critic discusses the world's greatest painters
1. MASACCIO 1401-1428
His nickname meaning 'Big Tom' or 'Clumsy Tom' (his real name, Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Mone Cassai, is remembered by no one), Masaccio died in 1428 aged only 26 while working on the Brancacci Chapel frescoes of the life of St Peter, including The Baptism Of The Neophytes. They were so astonishing in their realism, characterisation and communication of form, activity and emotion, that the chapel served as something of a school for later generations of Florentine painters, and to Vasari, the painter-historian, Masaccio was the founder of painting in Florence. Traces of his influence are evident in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael at the end of the 15th century. Even now, six centuries on, the realism of his nude Adam and Eve, and of the shivering boy waiting for baptism, his command of form, movement and character in grave and monumental figures fully-clothed, and his observation of architecture and landscape, all astonish us.
The Baptism Of The Neophytes: The figure of St Peter is monumental, as rounded as a sculpture, the real light of the chapel window seeming to fall on his back. Three converts to Christianity are to be baptised: one kneels in the shallow water of the River Jordan, the second shivers on the bank, the third is tugging off his clothes. In the Renaissance this is the earliest evidence of such realism in painting the nude from a live model
2. LEONARDO DA VINCI 1452-1519
The next great innovator. As a sculptor, architect, engineer, mathematician and scientist this 'universal genius' bequeathed only notebooks and drawings that were more or less unknown until the 19th century, but of paintings Leonardo left a dozen that were famous in their day, still venerated as among the greatest ever executed. The Last Supper remains an unprecedented masterpiece of dramatic organisation,the12Apostlescomposedin interlinking groups of three, all leading to the central figure of Christ in the setting of what seems a real room, with a real distant landscape beyond the windows. With the Mona Lisa he set a new pattern for portraiture, neither in profile nor full-face, but casually turning to smile gravely at the spectator and shift her weight onto the arm of her chair. Leonardo presents her as a heavy woman, mature, telling an unusual truth, her folded hands an informal touch of grace, her height against the landscape a subtle touch of grandeur. To understand how revolutionary this portrait was you must see it eye to eye at its horizon line, looking down and into it. It broke the mould of formal portraiture.
The Last Supper: The traditional representation of the Last Supper was a rank of 11 Apostles and Christ on one side of a long table, and Judas Iscariot on the other. Leonardo brought them all together, illustrating the moment Christ announced that one would betray him, and then depicted their startled responses of astonishment, dismay and recoil
3. RAPHAEL 1483-1520
Raphael was first to respond to Leonardo's Mona Lisa and, at 23, all but copied it in his portrait of Maddalena Doni, entirely missing the point of Leonardo's tonal control of colour, the subtle gravitas of his portrayal of bulk and, particularly, the high viewpoint. But within three years the precocious Raphael had learnt these lessons and was at work in the Vatican on his School Of Athens. In this, 15 years later than Leonardo's Last Supper, Raphael made a great leap beyond it, vastly enlarging the architecture of the pictorial space, seeming to fill the whole spreading and deepening extent with figures, developing and multiplying the rank on the upper step - yet loosening them too - that are the equivalent of Leonardo's rank of Apostles. A much more complex composition of which we find echoes in academic art until almost the end of the 19th century.
School Of Athens: Raphael constructed an unreal marvel of classical architecture for his assembly of philosophers, mathematicians and wise men of the ancient world. That Plato and Aristotle are giants among them is made clear, not by size, but by placing them centrally in the composition, framed by the arch, the space before them open, drawing our eyes toward them
4. MICHELANGELO 1475-1564
Michelangelo, who was the slightly older and contemptuous rival of Raphael, was less influenced by Leonardo than Leonardo was by him, and perhaps found more in Masaccio - it is possible to sense a recollection of the Brancacci Chapel even in the very last paintings of his long life, the twin frescoes of The Crucifixion Of St Peter and The Conversion Of St Paul. But Michelangelo is far better known for his biblical illustrations on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican and his Last Judgement on its altar wall - paintings that endowed European painters with a thousand ideas and images to beg, borrow and steal. The ceiling tells the tales from Genesis, embellished with prophets and sibyls, saints and sinners, heroic nude youths and the immortal Adam at the moment of his creation. The Last Judgement is a dramatic reminder of heaven and hell, the resurrected summoned by angels, the saved, the damned and the descent into the underworld. Where would Rubens in the 17th century have been without this great fresco to plunder?
The Last Judgement: In The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo applied his knowledge of the nude to the construction of an imagined ideal figure perfect in proportion and Herculean in musculature, realistic but not restrained by realism; God, supported by angels within his flowing cloak, reaches towards him, and their outstretched hands and pointing fingers are dramatically silhouetted as a bridge across a cloudless sky
5. TITIAN 1480-1576
His subjects, often secular, sexual-and mischievously mythological, convey delight in erotic pleasure, yet the emotion in his religious paintings was at least as strong. Widening the range of subjects open to the painter - the Venus Of Urbino more courtesan than goddess - he transformed the history of art and of patronage, enabling kings and princes of the Church to commission sexual seductions as readily as crucifixions. Painting in oil, the luxurious new medium, capable of richer, infinitely more intriguing surfaces, above all he made the material qualities of paint important, emphasising the touches of the brush and even sometimes of fingertips.
Venus Of Urbino: Venus looks straight at the spectator, a mistress looking at her lover, and we become him. Our eyes, first held by hers, break away to explore her expectant body from tresses to toes, savouring her breasts and belly, recognising her unabashed invitation to join in lechery
6. CARAVAGGIO 1571-1610
Caravaggio owed nothing directly to any earlier master but was immediately individual, quirky in his choice of androgynous youths in subjects ambiguous, erotic and illusionist. His at first discreet handling of paint swiftly grew broader - rougher even, at the end - his largely religious subjects becoming more and more dramatic in often steeply diagonal compositions dictated by the particular places in which his canvases were to hang, their drama enhanced by exaggerated contrasts in light and shadow, as seen in The Calling Of St Matthew, and the use of candle and lamp as the source of light within the pictures. This and his fervent adherence to realism - dirty feet and fingernails a speciality - at once attracted other painters, not only in Rome and Naples, but in Spain, France and the Netherlands, and Caravaggism became a pan-European phenomenon that did not fade until the later 18th century, Joseph Wright of Derby perhaps the last adherent of the style.
The Calling Of St Matthew: Matthew, a tax-gatherer, sits counting money with swaggering bravos, the teddy boys of Caravaggio's day. Christ, in biblical robes, on the far right, calls him, his pointing hand a brilliant echo of Michelangelo's, startlingly lit. Matthew's hand extends the gesture by pointing directly to his breast; his expression says, 'What, me?'
7. REMBRANDT 1606-1669
Though never a slave to Caravaggio, Rembrandt was profoundly influenced by his dramatic devices, and The Night Watch, his most famous and ambitious painting, demonstrates the point. Titian's influence is in it too, in the warm range of colour, the bold thickness of paint, fearless brushwork and sudden subtle touch that startles with its perfect accuracy. From the distance of a century, this heroic composition - the most magnificent and complex of group portraits - acknowledges a debt to the mastery of Raphael in his School Of Athens. In his virtuoso responses to these predecessors Rembrandt himself became a prodigious influence, particularly in portraiture.
The Night Watch: These central figures, proud Dutch burghers in all their foppery, are bourgeois echoes of Raphael's Plato and Aristotle, framed by the architecture and emphasised by the fall of light. The costume - black, the most expensive of dyes, indicating lofty status - is deliberately enlivened by the red shoulder sash
8. RUBENS 1577-1640
A late developer, not into his stride until well into his thirties, and an accomplished borrower - from antique Roman sculptors as well as Michelangelo, Titian and Caravaggio.
Their ideas for figures in dramatic action he seamlessly combined in restlessly complex compositions in which serpentine groups of figures rush across the painted stage or climb heavenward, and even his landscapes corkscrew into immeasurable distances.
He had no rival in urging painting into the Baroque era, yet the quality of his paint, as evident in The Descent From The Cross, was old-fashioned - thin, fluid, transparent, even enamel-like: far closer to Raphael than Rembrandt. There is, indeed, no greater contrast between great contemporaries than Rubens and Rembrandt in their maturity.
The Descent From The Cross: High drama and dreadful moment - lowering Christ's body. His dead weight has begun to slip; one man above him has let go, the other, the winding-sheet clenched in his teeth, has an uncertain grip on an arm; St John, in red, about to receive all the weight, but too precariously poised for it, looks over his shoulder at us, the spectators, for help.
9. VELAZQUEZ 1599-1660
The third member of this sublime 17th-century triumvirate-He knew Rubens, and took the old Venetian's free handling of paint so much further that not until Monet, Whistler and Sargent were at work did even painters comprehend him. His greatest painting was Las Meninas (The Maids Of Honour), a wonderful group portrait centred on the Spanish king's daughter, an ingenious composition in which he portrays himself in the act of painting the king and queen, but these stand with us as spectators outside the picture's space and can only be seen reflected in a small mirror on the rear wall of the studio. The subject here is what they could see while they posed for Velázquez - an exalted example of urbane and sympathetic realism.
Las Meninas: King Philip IV of Spain's painter, in the presence of the king, contrasts the perfections of the little princess with the imperfections of the adult dwarf who is one of their attendants. Is this a cruel joke - dwarves were for the amusement of the court - or is it a compassionate observation that in their way the ugly can be beautiful? The painter's grave old dog, not responding to the princeling's kick, is the answer to this question. The painter too was just such a faithful uncomplaining dog
10. PICASSO 1881-1973
Picasso, three centuries after Velázquez, between mid-August and the end of December 1957, dashed off 45 variations of his Las Meninas. At 76 and 'an old fool in the antechamber of death,' these are not the paintings by which he should be judged. The Picasso who matters is the young man of the Blue and Pink Periods, when he was delicate and compassionate, the genius in his late twenties who, embracing the primitive sculpture of sub-Saharan Africa, developed Cubism, and the fervent protester against Nazi German intervention in the Spanish Civil War who painted Guernica in 1937. This ugly masterpiece, a fractured monochrome composition from which all colour has been drained, was defined thus by Picasso: 'All living creatures in Guernica, human and animal, were turned into tortured objects, decomposed, distorted and shrieking their agony to the sky. The painting is simply a symbolic representation as seen in my own mind - that is all.' It was the last great painting. Nothing since has matched its stark imagery, impetuous emotion and ferocious response to tragedy, for by 1937 the art of painting was itself already on its deathbed - two decades earlier Marcel Duchamp, in exhibiting a urinal basin, had proclaimed that anything could be a work of art, and the art world had believed him. Now, a century on, no one knows what is art and what is not.
Guernica: Without space and perspective, Picasso offers not a classical composition but a fast-moving kaleidoscope of child-like images inspired by a superhuman act of total war, the saturation bombing of a little country town. In the foreground a man with a broken sword lies dead; behind, a mother screams over a dead child, a wounded horse screams its agony, an old woman screams, arms outstretched in grief and rage. In all these, in an impetuous storm of emotion, Picasso too screams like a child
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