Leonardo is widely considered to be one of the most diversely talented individuals ever to have lived. His areas of interest included invention, painting, sculpting, architecture, science, music, mathematics, engineering, literature, anatomy, geology, astronomy, botany, writing, history, and cartography. He is credited with the inventions of the parachute, the helicopter and the tank.

Vitruvian Man is his drawing based on the work of the architect Vitruvius. The drawing, in pen and ink on paper, depicts a man in two superimposed positions with his arms and legs apart and inscribed in a circle and square. The drawing and text are sometimes called the Canon of Proportions.

The drawing is based on the correlations of ideal human proportions with geometry described by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius. Vitruvius described the human figure as being the principal source of proportion among the classical orders of architecture.

René Magritte, born 1898 – died 1967 was a Belgian surrealist artist.

From 1916 to 1918, he studied at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, but found the instruction uninspiring. His early work was influenced by Futurism and by the figurative Cubism of Metzinger. From December 1920 until September 1921, Magritte served in the Belgian infantry in the Flemish town of Beverlo near Leopoldsburg. In 1922, he married Georgette Berger, whom he had first met as a child in 1913 and until 1923, he worked as a draughtsman in a wallpaper factory painting cabbage roses. He was a poster and advertisement designer until 1926, when a contract with Galerie 'Le Centaure' in Brussels made it possible for him to paint full-time.

Magritte described his paintings saying “my paintings are visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and indeed, when one sees one of my paintings, one asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does that mean?’. It does not mean anything because mystery means nothing, it is unknowable.”

Davinci started this portrait around 1503,and it is thought to be Lisa Gherardini, wife of a Florentine cloth merchant called Francesco Giocondo, hence it’s alternative name, La Gioconda. The work is described as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about and the most parodied work of art in the world". It is arguably the most valuable painting in the world. It is quite literally, priceless.

The Mona Lisa bears a strong resemblance to many Renaissance depictions of the Virgin Mary, who was at that time seen as an ideal for womanhood. The painting was one of the earliest portraits to depict the sitter in front of an imaginary landscape, and Leonardo was one of the first painters to use aerial perspective.

However, Leonardo seems to have taken the completed portrait to France rather than giving it to the person who commissioned it. It is not known how long Leonardo worked on the painting or how long he kept it, but after his death, the painting entered the collection of François I. and it is to this day on display in the Louvre museum in Paris.

Malevich was a Russian avant-garde artist and art theorist, whose pioneering work and writing had a profound influence on the development of 20th century abstract art. His concept of ‘Suprematism’ sought to develop a form of expression that moved as far as possible from the world of natural forms and subject matter in order to access "the supremacy of pure feeling" and spirituality.

Black Circle, painted in 1924, is an oil on canvas that depicts a monumental perfect black circle floating on a flat white background. Along with his Black Square of 1915, it is one of his most recognised early suprematism works, depicting pure geometrical figures in primary colours.

Malevich described the painting, along with the similar Black Square and Black Cross, as "new icons" for the aesthetics of modern art, and believed that their clarity and simplicity reflected traditional Russian piety.

Van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2,100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. They include landscapes, still lives, portraits and self-portraits, and are characterised by bold colours and dramatic, impulsive and expressive brushwork that contributed to the foundations of modern art.

Starry Night depicts the view from the east-facing window of his asylum room at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, just before sunrise, with the addition of an idealized village and is regarded as one of Van Gogh's finest works.

Van Gogh suffered from psychotic episodes and delusions and he often neglected his physical health, did not eat properly and drank heavily. His friendship with Gauguin ended after a confrontation with a razor, when in a rage, he severed part of his own left ear. His suicide at 37 followed years of mental illness and poverty.

Friedrich was a 19th-century German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation. Born in the town of Greifswald on the Baltic Sea in what was at the time Swedish Pomerania, he studied in Copenhagen until 1798, before settling in Dresden. He came of age during a period when, across Europe, a growing disillusionment with materialistic society was giving rise to a new appreciation of spirituality.

He is best known for his allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic or megalithic ruins. His primary interest as an artist was the contemplation of nature, and his work seeks to convey a subjective response to the natural world. Friedrich's paintings characteristically set a human presence in diminished perspective amid expansive landscapes, reducing the figures to a scale that emphasises Man’s insignificance compared to nature.

Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí was born in Catalonia, Spain in 1904 and died in 1989. His output of writing, films and art was prodigious and he was a skilled draftsman best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work.

This picture, The Persistence of Memory, painted in 1931, is better known simply as ‘melting clocks’ and epitomizes Dalí's theory of "softness" and "hardness" in a dream state. One interpretation suggests that Dalí was incorporating an understanding of the world introduced by Albert Einstein's groundbreaking Theory of Special Relativity, a new and revolutionary idea in the culture of the 1930s.

Dali shows the clocks melting away and thus losing their power and stability over the world around them. Through his melting clocks, Salvador Dali might be saying that simple machines like wall clocks and pocket watches are primitive, old-fashioned and even impotent in a post-Einstein world.

Banksy is an anonymous England-based graffiti artist. His satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have been featured on streets, walls, and bridges of cities throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a graffiti artist who later became a founding member of the English musical group Massive Attack.

Banksy's stencils feature striking and humorous images occasionally combined with slogans. The message is usually anti-war, anti-capitalist or anti-establishment. In 2007, Sotheby's auction house in London auctioned three works, reaching the highest ever price for a Banksy work at auction. To coincide with the second day of auctions, Banksy updated his website with a new image of an auction house scene showing people bidding on a picture that expressed amazement that people would pay for such transient works.

Painted in London, the subject of the painting is Whistler's mother, Anna McNeill Whistler. The painting currently is exhibited in and held by the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, having been bought by the French state in 1891. It is one of the most famous works by an American artist outside the United States and has been variously described as an American icon and a Victorian Mona Lisa.

The work was shown at the Royal Academy of Art in London in1872, after almost being rejected. This worsened the rift between Whistler and the British art world and he never again submitted a work to the Academy.

The image has been used since the Victorian era, especially in the United States, as an icon for motherhood and "family values" in general. In 1934, the U.S. Post office issued a stamp engraved with a stylized image of Whistler's Mother, accompanied by the slogan "In Memory and In Honor of the Mothers of America."

Warhol was an American artist, director and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture, and advertising that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. He is perhaps best recognised for his silkscreens featuring Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe.

Of Slovakian descent, he was born and raised in Pittsburgh and initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, The Factory, became a well-known gathering place that brought together distinguished intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, Bohemian street people, Hollywood celebrities, and wealthy patrons. In the late 1960s, he managed and produced the experimental rock band The Velvet Underground and founded Interview magazine. He is credited with coining the widely used expression "15 minutes of fame."

Jacques-Louis David was born into a prosperous family in Paris in 1748. When he was about nine his father was killed in a duel and his mother left him with his well-off architect uncles. He received an excellent education but was never a good student. His uncles and mother wanted him to be an architect but he wanted to be a painter. He overcame their opposition and went to learn from François Boucher (1703–1770), the leading painter of the time.

This painting shows a strongly idealized view of the real crossing that Napoleon and his army made across the Alps through the Great St. Bernard Pass in May 1800. The French victory in Italy and the installation of Napoleon as First Consul, led to the commission of this painting for the Royal Palace in Madrid. David produced three further versions for Napoleon: one for the Château de Saint-Cloud, one for the library of Les Invalides, and a third for the palace of the Cisalpine Republic in Milan.