Top 10 Famous Italian Paintings, Giotto to Boccioni (2026 List)

These ten famous Italian paintings cover about six hundred years. The list starts with Giotto, who painted every wall of a small chapel in Padua between 1303 and 1305. It ends in 1910 with Boccioni's giant horses in a growing Milan. In between come Botticelli's Venus, the Mona Lisa, Caravaggio, Artemisia Gentileschi and more. For other countries and other times, you can browse our gallery of famous paintings. The table below puts all ten in order of how often people in the US look each one up on Google.

The Renaissance has its own list of twelve paintings from Masaccio to Titian. That is where you will find The Last Supper and The School of Athens. France has nine French masterpieces and their stories, and Spain has great paintings from El Greco to Picasso.

Italy's ten famous paintings, ranked by Google searches

Searches are monthly averages for the US, taken from Google in October 2026. The trend sets the latest six months against the six months before them.

People look up the Mona Lisa about three times as often as the other nine put together. Of all ten, only The Birth of Venus is searched a little more now than it was half a year ago.

From Giotto to the High Renaissance: 1303 to 1519

01Lamentation (The Mourning of Christ), Giotto (1303 to 1305)

For almost seven hundred years, people have called Giotto the father of European painting. A man named Enrico degli Scrovegni asked him to paint his family's chapel in Padua. Giotto covered the whole inside with wall paintings in about two years. The chapel was built against the family's palace, and that palace followed the oval shape of an old Roman arena. That is why it is also called the Arena Chapel.

The Lamentation shows the people who loved Jesus crying over his body. Two of them sit with their backs to us, so it feels as if we are part of the circle too. A bare rock slopes down toward the two faces of Mary and her son. Above them, some of the angels cover their faces.

Giotto made his scenes look deep and real. He did it about a hundred years before other artists wrote down the rules for showing depth. To protect the paintings, visitors now wait in a cool room before they go in. You can see Giotto next to Cimabue and Duccio in eight landmarks of Gothic painting.

02The Birth of Venus, Botticelli (about 1485)

The title says "birth," but Sandro Botticelli painted what happens just after it. The goddess Venus has already come out of the sea. Now the winds blow her shell to the shore of Cyprus. A young woman waits there, and she holds out a cloak covered in flowers. Botticelli used real gold for the bright parts of her long hair.

No one knows for sure who asked for the painting. Nothing written about it survives from before 1550. That year a writer named Giorgio Vasari saw it in a country house of the Medici family. The orange trees in the picture point to the Medici too. In those days oranges were called mala medica, and that sounded like the family's name.

03Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci (1503 to 1519)

The Mona Lisa is probably the most famous painting in the world. It shows Lisa Gherardini, a woman from Florence who married a silk trader named Francesco del Giocondo. Leonardo painted her in oil on a thin board of wood.

For a long time no one could prove when he started. Then in 2005 a note turned up in an old book in a library in Heidelberg, Germany. A man named Agostino Vespucci had written it in the margin in October 1503. In it he compared Leonardo to a painter from ancient times who left his work unfinished. As his example, he named the head of Lisa del Giocondo, so we know the work had begun.

The original and our hand-painted copy

The original

Our reproduction, painted by hand in oil

Leonardo kept working on the portrait for the rest of his life. In 1518 Francis I, the king of France, paid Leonardo's student for some paintings. So the king very probably got the Mona Lisa that year. Since then, thick varnish on top has turned yellow, and that is why the blue sky now looks green. To see how she compares with other icons, look at the world's 30 best-known paintings, ranked.

04The Creation of Adam, Michelangelo (1508 to 1512)

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican started as a repair job. In May 1504 a long crack opened in it, so Pope Julius II decided to have it painted again. In 1508 Michelangelo signed a contract to paint twelve apostles and some patterns. But he thought that plan was "a poor thing," and the pope let him design the whole ceiling himself.

Down the middle of the ceiling, he painted nine stories from the Bible's book of Genesis. He finished the first half by August 1510, and The Creation of Adam is in the second half. The whole ceiling was done by the end of October 1512. On November 1 the pope said Mass under it.

Look at the small gap between the two hands. Adam's hand hangs loose, but God's finger stretches hard toward it. Michelangelo didn't make many other paintings, and you can see them in his small group of paintings.

Venice, Caravaggio and Artemisia: 1562 to 1620

05The Wedding Feast at Cana, Paolo Veronese (1562 to 1563)

Paolo Veronese painted The Wedding Feast at Cana for the dining hall of a group of monks in Venice. He took the Bible story of the wedding at Cana and set it at a Venetian party of his own time. More than a hundred guests fill the table. It is the biggest painting in the Louvre, and it hangs right across the room from the Mona Lisa.

It didn't come to Paris by choice. In 1797 Napoleon's soldiers took it, rolled up the huge canvas and shipped it to France. When Napoleon's empire fell in 1815, most of the paintings he took went back to Italy. But the Louvre was afraid the long trip would harm this one, so it stayed in Paris. A painting by Charles Le Brun was given in exchange. It is one of the Louvre's highlights beyond the Mona Lisa.

06The Calling of Saint Matthew, Caravaggio (1599 to 1600)

Caravaggio's Calling of Saint Matthew was part of his first big public job. He painted three big scenes from the life of Saint Matthew for a side chapel in a church in Rome, San Luigi dei Francesi. This one still hangs there. It shows the moment Jesus calls a tax collector named Levi, who then becomes Saint Matthew.

He liked to paint Bible stories as if they were taking place in his own day. Here Matthew sits at a table full of coins, dressed in fine clothes, with armed men around him. Jesus points at him from the right, and Matthew points at himself. A beam of light comes in from the upper right and cuts through the dark room.

Jesus's pointing hand comes from Adam's hand on the Sistine ceiling. His halo is just a thin gold line, so it is easy to miss, and one of the men counting money wears glasses. You can find out where to see each major Caravaggio.

07Judith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi (about 1620)

Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith Beheading Holofernes shows the killing itself. Judith holds the army general Holofernes by the hair as her sword cuts into his neck. His blood sprays so far that it stains her chest. She painted it in Rome around 1620, after seven years in Florence. In Rome she could study Caravaggio's paintings again.

When the painting arrived in Florence, it got a cold welcome. It looked so raw and real that people reacted strongly to it, and it wasn't given a place in the gallery. Then the duke who had agreed to pay for it died in 1621. She got her money much later, and only because her friend Galileo Galilei helped her.

She went on to work for the courts of Rome, Florence and Naples, and she traveled to England. She was also the first woman to join Florence's academy of art. You can read more of her story among twenty women painters from Artemisia to O'Keeffe.

Venice, Milan and the modern city: about 1725 to 1910

08The Stonemason's Yard, Canaletto (about 1725)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

In The Stonemason's Yard, Canaletto shows a busy corner of Venice in about 1725. A church nearby was being fixed, so the square had turned into a yard for cutting stone. That is how the painting got its nickname.

The early morning sun falls on the people around the stone. A mother runs to a small child who has fallen over, while her daughter and a neighbor at an upstairs window watch. On a balcony a woman is spinning thread. Another woman pulls up water from a well that still stands in the square today.

Across the Grand Canal you can see the church of Santa Maria della Carità and its tall bell tower. But that tower fell down in 1744, and no one ever built it again. So if you stand in the square now, the tower Canaletto painted isn't there.

09The Kiss, Francesco Hayez (1859)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Hayez's Kiss is one of the most famous Italian paintings of the 1800s. It has become a symbol of the Brera art museum in Milan. The couple wear clothes from the Middle Ages, but the year it was painted tells you what it is about.

In 1859 the army of King Victor Emmanuel II and the French army beat the Austrian army, and then they marched into Milan. Two years later, in 1861, Italy became one country. The museum sees the young man as a soldier who has signed up to fight. He is saying goodbye to the woman he loves. Look closely, and you will see a dagger hanging from his belt under his brown cloak.

The colors carry a message too. Her blue dress and his red and green clothes bring together the colors of the French and Italian flags. Hayez went on to paint the same subject several more times.

10The City Rises, Umberto Boccioni (1910)

Hand-painted oil reproductionSee sizes ›

Umberto Boccioni led the Futurists, a group of Italian artists who praised machines. He painted The City Rises in 1910 to cheer for Milan as it grew into a city of factories. But he didn't give the city's energy to machines. He gave it to huge work horses with men pulling hard beside them. You can only spot a puffing train and a streetcar far in the background.

The painting traveled around Europe with a Futurist show in 1912 and 1913. In 1951 the Museum of Modern Art in New York bought it. The museum showed it the next year. It was one of two new paintings there that had never been seen in the United States, and the other one was by Picasso. In October 2026 it was not on view at MoMA, so check before you go.

Four famous Italian artists

Who are four famous Italian artists? The quickest answer comes from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. They were named after four Renaissance artists: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello. Two of them have paintings on this list. To go beyond the Renaissance, add Giotto from the years before it, Caravaggio from the years after it and Hayez from the 1800s.

Seeing famous Italian paintings where they were made

Three of these paintings are still in the places they were made for. Giotto's chapel is in Padua, and Michelangelo's ceiling and Caravaggio's side chapel are in Rome. So on a trip to those two cities, you can see them just where the painters meant them to be. The other seven now hang in museums. The Mona Lisa, Hayez's Kiss and Canaletto's square are among the famous paintings our studio artists copy by hand in oil.

Sources

• Cappella degli Scrovegni, official site (Padua)
• Cappella degli Scrovegni, The Scrovegni Chapel
• Britannica, Arena Chapel
• Britannica, Giotto
• Uffizi Galleries, Birth of Venus
• Louvre, Portrait of Lisa Gherardini (Mona Lisa), collection record
• Britannica, Mona Lisa
• Louvre, A superstar and a wedding crowd (Room 711)
• Louvre, Louvre Nouvelle Renaissance architecture competition
• Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel: the Ceiling
• Vatican Museums, Sistine Chapel ceiling: the Central Stories
• Louvre, The Wedding Feast at Cana, collection record
• Louvre, From the Mona Lisa to The Wedding Feast at Cana
• Smarthistory (Beth Harris and Steven Zucker), Caravaggio's Calling of St. Matthew, via Lumen Learning
• Utah Valley University, Art History: Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew
• Britannica, Caravaggio
• Uffizi Galleries, Judith Beheading Holofernes
• National Gallery, Canaletto, Venice: Campo S. Vidal and Santa Maria della Carità (The Stonemason's Yard)
• Pinacoteca di Brera, Il Bacio di Francesco Hayez (Room 38 description)
• MoMA, Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises
• MoMA, press release on the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund exhibition (1952)
• Britannica, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles