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A small painting (18 inches by 18 inches) that packs a big art-historical punch, Mondrian’s work represents a radical distillation of form, color and composition to their basic components. Limiting his palette to the primary triad (red, yellow and blue), plus black and white, Mondrian applied pigment in flat unmixed patches in an arrangement of squares and rectangles that anticipated Minimalism.

Manet’s scene of picnicking Parisians caused a scandal when it debuted at the Salon des Refusés, the alternative exhibition made up of works rejected by the jurors of the annual Salon—the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts that set artistic standards in France. The most vociferous objections to Manet’s work centered on the depiction of a n**e woman in the company of men dressed in contemporary clothes. Based on motifs borrowed from such Renaissance greats as Raphael and Giorgione, Le Déjeuner was a cheeky send up of classical figuration—an insolent mash-up of modern life and painting tradition.

Bruegel’s fanfare for the common man is considered one of the defining works of Western art. This composition was one of six created on the theme of the seasons. The time is probably early September. A group of peasants on the left cut and bundle ripened wheat, while the on the right, another group takes their midday meal. One figure is sacked out under a tree with his pants unbuttoned. This attention to detail continues throughout the painting as a procession of ever-granular observations receding into space. It was extraordinary for a time when landscapes served mostly as backdrops for religious paintings.

The ur-canvas of 20th-century art, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon ushered in the modern era by decisively breaking with the representational tradition of Western painting, incorporating allusions to the African masks that Picasso had seen in Paris's ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadro. Its compositional DNA also includes El Greco’s The Vision of Saint John (1608–14), now hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The women being depicted are actually prostitutes in a brothel in the artist's native Barcelona.

Georges Seurat’s masterpiece, evoking the Paris of La Belle Epoque, is actually depicting a working-class suburban scene well outside the city’s center. Seurat often made this milieu his subject, which differed from the bourgeois portrayals of his Impressionist contemporaries. Seurat abjured the capture-the-moment approach of Manet, Monet and Degas, going instead for the sense of timeless permanence found in Greek sculpture. And that is exactly what you get in this frieze-like processional of figures whose stillness is in keeping with Seurat’s aim of creating a classical landscape in modern form.

This fantastical triptych is generally considered a distant forerunner to Surrealism. In truth, it’s the expression of a late medieval artist who believed that God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell were real. Of the three scenes depicted, the left panel shows Christ presenting Eve to Adam, while the right one features the depredations of Hell; less clear is whether the center panel depicts Heaven. In Bosch’s perfervid vision of Hell, an enormous set of ears wielding a ph***ic knife attacks the damned, while a bird-beaked bug king with a chamber pot for a crown sits on its throne, devouring the doomed before promptly defecating them out again. This riot of symbolism has been largely impervious to interpretation, which may account for its widespread appeal.

One of the most significant works produced during the Northern Renaissance, this composition is believed to be one of the first paintings executed in oils. A full-length double portrait, it reputedly portrays an Italian merchant and a woman who may or may not be his bride. In 1934, the celebrated art historian Erwin Panofsky proposed that the painting is actually a wedding contract. What can be reliably said is that the piece is one of the first depictions of an interior using orthogonal perspective to create a sense of space that seems contiguous with the viewer’s own; it feels like a painting you could step into.

Opulently gilded and extravagantly patterned, The Kiss, Gustav Klimt’s fin-de-siècle portrayal of intimacy, is a mix of Symbolism and Vienna Jugendstil, the Austrian variant of Art Nouveau. Klimt depicts his subjects as mythical figures made modern by luxuriant surfaces of up-to-the moment graphic motifs. The work is a highpoint of the artist’s Golden Phase between 1899 and 1910 when he often used gold leaf—a technique inspired by a 1903 trip to the Basilica di San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, where he saw the church’s famed Byzantine mosaics.