Best Paintings of all Time

Herbert James Draper's (1863-1920) painting of 'The Lament for Icarus' is a really beautiful piece of art. Nice details like Icarus very tanned skin for someone who was flying under the sun for quite some time as the myth says, in contrast of the very pale fair skin of the nymphs, only adds to the appeal of the painting. Even being different from the original myth where his wings were partially made of wax and should be melted by then, doesn't diminish much from this powerful painting. I particularly like the huge wings, because I think it kind of make it believable to think that with the right engineering those wings could work. I also love the fact that the wings are based on the bird-of-paradise pattern.

 'The Empire of Lights' series of paintings by René Magritte (1898-1967) are very ordinary if you look for the techniques employed. At the same time though, it's this lack of artistic depth that makes them for fantastic surrealist paintings. All the three of them are very dark nocturnal scenes settled against a bright blue sky with fluffy clouds. Magritte is a genius because of this in my opinion. He doesn't need fantastical elements to make surrealism, just a subtle paradoxical combination of day and night. He deconstructs fundamental organizing laws of nature, but at the same time he doesn't, for a scene like that is very plausible under the right circumstances. Still it's pretty ingenious to make sunlight, the source of clarity, to be the element who causes the unease feeling normally associated with darkness. The luminosity becomes disturbing by making the darkness below even more
indecipherable and therefore scarier than it would normally seem. I chose only two of those paintings, because it exemplifies better my description here.