Paintings

Imagine walking into the Sistine Chapel. There is silence, or something close to it, because hundreds of people are breathing with their heads tilted back. Everyone is looking for Michelangelo's ceiling, the finger of Adam, the God stretching out through the clouds. Few lower their eyes to the altar wall, where the Last Judgment unfolds like a storm of bodies. And almost no one knows that beneath that storm there was once another wall: a serene, luminous wall, painted by a man whose name hardly rings a bell today.

Some paintings invite quiet contemplation, and others demand to be interrogated. Painted on a modest oak panel of barely 82 by 60 centimeters, The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), now held at the National Gallery in London, belongs to the second kind. Jan van Eyck did not simply portray a man and a woman holding hands in a comfortable room: he conceived one of the most fascinating, complex and debated works in the history of art.

Leonardo da Vinci is one of the greatest geniuses humanity has ever produced. Although his legacy spans multiple disciplines such as science, anatomy, engineering and botany, it was in art that he achieved undisputed immortality. His ability to capture the essence of humanity, combined with flawless technical mastery, places him among the greatest artists of all time.

A young woman is reading. Perhaps the room is silent. Then someone appears, and everything changes. The visitor is the Archangel Gabriel, and the news he brings will transform Mary's life forever: she will become the mother of Jesus. The story occupies only a few lines in the Gospel of Luke, but it gave artists an irresistible scene. How do you paint the moment when someone receives news like this? What would Mary's expression look like?