The son of a Tuscan shepherd, Giotto di Bondone rose to become the most important artist of his age, kick starting the Renaissance with his naturalistic and emotive treatment of medieval Christian iconography.

Leonardo da Vinci's great masterpiece the Mona Lisa is undoubtedly the most famous painting in the history of art. Yet as is often remarked Leonardo was much more than an artist.

Far from the cultural centers of Italy, the German artist Albrecht Dürer established his workshop in the city of Nuremberg, providing a centre for what was to become known as the northern Renaissance.

Of all the great artists that left their mark on the story of art, Michelangelo Buonarroti stands alone, so great were his achievements.

Any young artist who had risen to artistic maturity overshadowed by the towering reputations of Leonardo and Michelangelo could easily have been discouraged. Not so Raffaelo Santi of Urbino.

After the triumph of Renaissance art in Florence and Rome, the movement found a new centre, the city of Venice, and a new master, Tiziano Vecellio, known to English speakers as Titian.

Very little is known of the life of Pieter Bruegel the Elder whose enigmatic, humorous, sometimes grotesque paintings remain among the most distinctive examples of Netherlandish art.

The paintings of the artist El Greco are among the most distinctive works of the early modern period. His paintings marked a radical departure from the naturalism and careful modeling of the Renaissance, and as result were ignored for close to 300 years.

Rubens is regarded as the chief exponent of the Baroque style, merging the grace of the Italian High Renaissance with the realism and landscapes genres of the northern tradition.

In a Spain dominated by a fervent religiosity, the painter Diego de Silva y Velàzquez emerged as a master practitioner of a secular form of art.

Two eyes peer out of the gloom, they are the eyes of Rembrandt van Rijn, a man whose name is synonymous with the Dutch Golden Age and the city of Amsterdam.

In the three hundred years since his death, the name Johannes Vermeer languished in the backwaters of art history. Yet in recent times his status as a great artist has been assured and his paintings are more popular today than ever before.

The most famous of all British painters, J. M. W. Turner was a visionary and a maverick, whose landscape paintings both astounded and antagonized those that saw them.