Like fellow Pop Artists Lichtenstein and Warhol, Jasper Johns used familiar symbols and images, but reshaped and transformed them to present them in new ways. Unlike his fellow Pop Artists, who preferred commercial and pop culture symbols, Johns largely used icons of Americana, most notably the American flag and maps of the United States. One of Johns' most well known paintings is of an American flag that is completely in white.

Frida Kahlo was a Mexican artist who took up painting after a horrific bus accident at the age of eighteen in 1925 and her marriage to the European-trained muralist Diego Rivera. Kahlo painted almost entirely self portraits, typically close ups of her own face, to which she added in the background indigenous native imagery, surrealist symbols, and references to her own troubled life. Her stormy marriage to Rivera was well known, and combined with her ill health contributed to a sense of loneliness and alienation in her work.

Nighthawks was painted in 1942 by Edward Hopper, who sought to capture the inherent loneliness and suffocation of the "new" urban society as well as the effects of wartime.

Dada was an art movement that grew out of abstract and modernist movements in the early twentieth century. One of the most famous dadaist artists was Marcel Duchamp, a frenchman who began his career in a cubist vein, but then sought to make art that was less "retinal," or simply pleasing to the eye. Duchamp's art work challenged the very notion of what was "art," as in his 1917 "Fountain," a urinal Duchamp placed in the middle of a gallery space and only attributed as "R Mutt."

The Garden of Earthly Delights, painted between 1490 and 1510, is a highly idiosyncratic and complicated triptych of the Garden of Eden, earthly pleasures, and their subsequent punishment in a hell-like atmosphere. The religious overtones and multi-faceted story are features of most paintings by Hieronymus Bosch, who was an early Netherlandish painter during the Renaissance. Bosch's painting, now in the Museo del Prado in Madrid, was highly influential for its depiction of human forms, its allegorical tales, and its peculiar form of storytelling.

Hans Holbein the Younger made a name for himself by painting nearly every figure associated with the court of the English king Henry VIII. In doing so, he helped pioneer a new use of perspective in his portraits. Holbein's work helped push Renaissance art to new places simply through portraits.

Jan van Eyck was a transformative figure in European painting, as his approach to painting depended on realism and a naturalistic viewpoint. His Ghent Altarpiece, also called The Lamb of God, was a departure from Medieval standards that typically valued idealization and symbolism in religious imagery. Van Eyck, who lived from 1390 to 1441, had an outsized influence on the artistic transformations that occurred during the Renaissance.

Michelangelo (1475-1564) is often considered the prototypical "Renaissance man," along with Leonardo da Vinci, thanks to his key involvement in painting, sculpture, and design. Michelangelo was one of the earliest painters to use realistic imagery, forced perspective, and an enhanced use of color. His work was key in the development of Renaissance themes like a return to classical motifs, a sense of grandeur, and the use of scientific knowledge in the arts.

The Vitruvian Man was drawn by Leonardo da Vinci, a contemporary rival of Michelangelo. Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which included the famous Creation of Adam image. The Last Judgment is also in the Sistine Chapel, though it was painted almost 30 years after the ceiling. The Crucifixion of St. Peter was also one of Michelangelo's later works. Both Michelangelo and da Vinci were commissioned to design paintings for the city of Florence, thus Michelangelo drew the plan for the Battle of Cascina, though the final painting was never completed.

Diego Velazquez was an idiosyncratic painter who became the offical court painter for the Spanish king Philip IV. Velazquez's unique composition style, love of odd subjects, and expressive portrait style found its culmination in Las Meninas, a 1656 painting that shows the daughters of the King with their attendants and the painter in a large room with people coming and going. The painting was so remarkable that Pablo Picasso made a cubist version of it in the twentieth century.