You have to zoom in on her face because these may be the most beautiful eyes ever put on canvas, and once you understand what she is looking at, they become almost unbearable... The painting is Joan of Arc, made by the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1879, and it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is enormous, more than eight feet tall, and it shows Joan not as a warrior in armor, but as what she actually was before any of it: a peasant girl of thirteen, standing in her parents' garden in the French countryside. The Met describes her eyes as wide open and clear blue, her cheeks feverishly flushed, her gaze turned upward and away, and they are right, this is the face of someone who is no longer fully in the garden... She has just heard the voices and behind her, among the trees, Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine have appeared, and they are telling this teenage girl the impossible thing she was born to do: leave home, take up a sword, and drive an army of invaders out of France. Her eyes are fixed on something the rest of us cannot see, but her bare feet are digging into the earth, and one hand grips a branch beside her. She is being called toward something vast and terrifying, and every muscle in her is trying to stay rooted to the ground she knows. The artist caught the precise moment a girl is torn between the life she has and the fate she cannot refuse. And everyone knows how the story ends: she would follow those voices, she would lead armies, crown a king, and be captured, and at nineteen she would be burned alive as a heretic, still insisting the voices were real. Everything that was coming for her is already there, waiting, behind those wide blue eyes in this peaceful garden...

No one painted silk like Vittorio Reggianini

Artemisia Gentileschi was raped in her own home at seventeen, in 1611, by a friend of her father. In the trial that followed, she was the one made to suffer to prove she was telling the truth, while her attacker walked free. Some of that pain found its way into her paintings, and few are as raw, or as unforgettable, as this one... It's called Judith beheading Holofernes: two women are pinning a man to a bed. The younger one, a servant, throws her whole weight across him to hold down his flailing arms while his fist shoves back at her. The other, Judith, forces his head into the sheets with one hand, and with the other drags a sword through his throat. The blood pours into the white linen at the very front of the canvas, as close to you as the painting can bring it. The story comes from the Book of Judith. Holofernes is an Assyrian general laying siege to her city. Judith, a young widow, walks into his camp, wins his trust, and when he collapses into a drunken sleep, she and her maid cut off his head and save her people. Caravaggio had painted the same scene in Rome a decade earlier, but his Judith shrinks back from the act, holding the sword at arm's length while a withered old servant simply watches. Artemisia's two women do it together, and her Judith does not flinch. You can see the strain in her wrists. She had painted this subject once before, around the time of the trial, before she turned twenty. But she could not let it go. Roughly eight years later she painted this version, larger and bloodier. The blood here is leaping from his neck in long arcs that, one study found, closely trace the curved path of a projectile, the same path her friend Galileo was working out in those very years. On Judith's arm she added a bracelet, its tiny carved figures, one scholar suggests, showing Artemis, the goddess whose name she carried... To understand the fury in it, you have to know what happened to her. The man who raped her, Agostino Tassi, was her father's colleague, and afterward he promised to marry her. When he never did, her father took him to court. The case dragged on for seven months. To test whether she was lying, the court wound cords around her fingers and pulled them tight, the same fingers she painted with. Tassi was subjected to nothing of the kind. As the cords bit into her hands, she screamed the same words over and over: "È vero. È vero. È vero." It is true. Then she turned to the man who had promised to marry her and said: "This is the ring you give me, and these are your promises." Tassi was found guilty and offered a choice between five years of hard labor and exile from Rome. He chose exile, and the sentence was never enforced. Her reputation did not survive as easily: Tassi had bribed witnesses to swear she had slept with other men, and produced forged love letters in her name, and soon she was the subject of lewd sonnets traded around the city. To salvage what was left of her honor, she was married off to a Florentine painter, Pierantonio Stiattesi, the day after the trial ended, and sent away from the only city she had ever known. The man who raped her walked free. She was the one forced to leave... But nothing said in that courtroom could touch what she could do with a brush, and today she is regarded as one of the finest painters of the seventeenth century. In 1649, reassuring a client about the quality of the work she was making for him, she wrote a line that has outlived everyone who tried to break her: "I will show Your Illustrious Lordship what a woman can do."

No one painted water like the Norwegian impressionist Frits Thaulow

C. S. Lewis introduced The Chronicles of Narnia with a message to his goddaughter:

Somewhere in the world is a painting worth 250 million dollars: it has been missing for 36 years, and the museum it was stolen from is still offering ten million dollars to get it back... The painting is The Concert, by Johannes Vermeer, made around 1664. It is a small, still scene, a man and two women making music together in a sunlit room, and it is considered the most valuable stolen artwork on earth. Part of what makes it so precious is that Vermeer painted very few pictures in his lifetime, and only 34 of them are known to survive anywhere in the world. This was one of them... On the night of March 18, 1990, two men dressed as police officers talked their way into the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, tied up the guards, and walked out 81 minutes later with 13 works of art, the largest art theft in history. The Concert was the greatest prize among them. It was also the very first major artwork Isabella Stewart Gardner ever bought, in 1892, the purchase that began the collection that would eventually bear her name. More than three decades later, not one of the stolen works has ever been found. In the Dutch Room where it once hung, the museum still keeps the empty frame on the wall, exactly where it has always been, hoping that one day it will come home...

This is not a photograph. Every leaf and every reflection was put there by hand, in oil, by the Danish painter Peder Mørk Mønsted in 1894. It is called Wooded path by a river, and it captures the hardest thing there is to paint: a forest in full sunlight. Light through trees never falls evenly. It scatters into countless flecks of brightness and shadow, a glow on one leaf, darkness on the next, a glint on the water that would vanish the moment a cloud passed. Get those even slightly wrong, and the whole thing collapses into a green blur. Mønsted got every one of them right, and in doing so he captured something anyone who has stood alone in a wood will recognize immediately: that hush that falls over you, the sense of being completely at peace, and the feeling that the whole world has paused to breathe…

You have to zoom in on her face because these may be the most beautiful eyes ever put on canvas, and once you understand what she is looking at, they become almost unbearable... The painting is Joan of Arc, made by the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage in 1879, and it hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is enormous, more than eight feet tall, and it shows Joan not as a warrior in armor, but as what she actually was before any of it: a peasant girl of thirteen, standing in her parents' garden in the French countryside. The Met describes her eyes as wide open and clear blue, her cheeks feverishly flushed, her gaze turned upward and away, and they are right, this is the face of someone who is no longer fully in the garden... She has just heard the voices and behind her, among the trees, Saints Michael, Margaret, and Catherine have appeared, and they are telling this teenage girl the impossible thing she was born to do: leave home, take up a sword, and drive an army of invaders out of France. Her eyes are fixed on something the rest of us cannot see, but her bare feet are digging into the earth, and one hand grips a branch beside her. She is being called toward something vast and terrifying, and every muscle in her is trying to stay rooted to the ground she knows. The artist caught the precise moment a girl is torn between the life she has and the fate she cannot refuse. And everyone knows how the story ends: she would follow those voices, she would lead armies, crown a king, and be captured, and at nineteen she would be burned alive as a heretic, still insisting the voices were real. Everything that was coming for her is already there, waiting, behind those wide blue eyes in this peaceful garden...