His mother died of tuberculosis when he was just 5, and he and his siblings were raised by their father who was a doctor but also the very pious son of a priest.

Munch said his obsessively religious father often told his children that their mother was looking down on them from Heaven and weeping at their bad behavior, which can really mess a kid up.

Klimt was mainly an introvert who liked to walk around the house in his bathrobe and nothing else, but still somehow had many mistresses throughout his life. One – fashion designer Emilie Louise Flöge – is thought to be the model for his most famous painting, The Kiss.

He’s an icon of the Northern Renaissance and like many artists of his time painted both secular and religious subjects.

Most of his paintings are very complex and contain rich symbolism and you see something new each time you look.

As for the Putin-esque nature of some of his subjects, it’s been noted before, but no one can explain it.

The majority of his paintings are religious in nature and his work can be found in the Sistine Chapel, although most people miss them because they’re busy looking up at the ceiling.

He also went through a secular/mythology-inspired phase during which he produced The Birth of Venus and paintings like it and painted several portraits of influential patrons who kind of look like jerks.

While she also painted landscapes and skyscrapers, she’s best known for her close-up portraits of flowers that people just can’t help but compare to female genitalia.

If you look long enough, you can’t unsee it.

He was discovered shortly after getting into graffiti art and by the age of 20, he was able to sell a single painting for $25,000. He collaborated with the likes of Andy Warhol before his untimely death.

Tuberculosis plagued him throughout his life and often interfered with his ability to work.

After moving to Paris, he underwent a transformation that led him to willfully discard all trappings of middle-class life and live as a sloppy, drunken, drug-abuser. He was even a bit too much for the bohemian crowd.

His death at 35 turned him into a sort of legend of the tragic/tortured artist.

Later, he dropped out of Yale, finding it too racist and elitist, and then landed in New York among the struggling artist set that waited tables in their spare time.

In his early years, he did paint portraits and urban scenes, but we now know him by his later work that looks to most people like just a bunch of stripes.

After WWII began, she moved with her husband to the U.S. and painted celebrity portraits. But her best-known work is of anonymous aristocratic and impossibly cool women.

Fun fact: You can even see some of her works in the background Modanna’s early music videos.

Other artists used to sneak him into the Sistine Chapel so he could view the ceiling and he was heavily influenced by Michelangelo’s work.

You probably know him best from his most famous painting, The School of Athens.

But his Cubist works are the easiest to recognize. He developed the style with fellow artist Georges Braque and they worked side-by-side to develop the technique.

He was so good that he never even went abroad and yet still had an influence on painters throughout Europe.

You should probably know you’re looking at da Vinci if you see the Mona Lisa or The Last Supper, but in cases where you’re not, just look for beautifully calm people and really unfortunate-looking infants.

You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t consider da Vinci a genius – he even drew sketches of the first flying machines, parachutes, and tanks centuries before they became a reality.

When the women he paints are not wearing fancy hats, they tend to be nude – and quite voluptuous in the derriere.

He was one of the artists most influential in the Impressionist movement and heavily influenced artists such as Renoir (but you can tell them apart easily because Renoir really liked his pastels).

Many of his paintings depict people engaged in social activities, but he did have a moment when he was interested in painting war scenes.

His most famous painting is The Resistance of Memory, but he produced over 1500 paintings throughout his life. He was friends with the equally eclectic (in style, at least) Picasso and lived in a time when artists were celebrities, which he was happy to take advantage of.

His most famous paintings depict ballerinas, people at horse races, and nude women.

Despite looking like they’re all thinking absolutely nothing, his subjects are known for their psychological complexity.

The Tower of Babel is his most recognizable work, but you can generally pick out his paintings by the large number of people they contain. If you see peasants, violence, or really weird stuff (like two animals sitting down to dinner at a table), it’s Bruegel the Elder.

His son, Bruegel the Younger, copied some of his father’s works and had a very similar style, but his paintings are less delightfully weird.

He mostly painted the French countryside and liked to play with the different kinds of light brought by each passing season.

His midlife crisis basically involved buying a house and getting it landscaped with lily ponds which he then spent the next 20 painting. As artists go, it was pretty tame.

He painted so many different things that it’s impossible to pick out his work based on the subject alone.

The people in his paintings look anything but serene (unless they’re nude women bathing), but you can also pick out his work by its relative darkness but simultaneous love of the color red.

Like da Vinci, he used what’s called the chiaroscuro method of juxtaposing light and darkness and his paintings are generally portraits or scenes of violent struggle.

He was frequently arrested for violent crimes, went to trial 11 times, and once killed a guy in Naples. For a vicious criminal, his work is simply breathtaking.

She’s known for her self-portraits, which often portray the pain she went through after failed spinal surgery following a bus accident in 1925.

His art was so beloved that he often rivals da Vinci as the greatest Renaissance master – and in fact they were rivals IRL.

He created two of the most recognizable frescoes in the history of Western art for the Sistine Chapel, but if you really want to get a sense of his genius, you need to look at his sculptures, specifically the Pietà and David.

In his quest to find a universal artistic “vocabulary,” he eventually reduced his paintings to nothing simple geometric elements.

Like Rothko, people often get an “I could totally do that” attitude when looking at his paintings.

If you look at some of his earlier work, you’d never guess it was painted by the same guy.

For some reason, no matter how many nude women he painted – and he painted A LOT – he never quite mastered the breasts.

Women are generally painted as full-figured (hence the term “Rubenesque”), passive, sensual, and soft while the men are athletic and active.

But of the roughly 25 paintings we can attribute to him, most of them contain lots of tiny people, many of them suffering in hell.

His silkscreen paintings depicted pop culture images.

He was a superstar in the 1960s and his New York studio, The Factory, became was a gathering place for a motley crew of armchair intellectuals, drag queens, playwrights, celebrities, and the wealthy people who wanted to hang out with the “cool kids.”

Much of his work is composed of pastoral scenes, nude women, and biblical and mythological subjects.

He was heavily influenced by Rubens, but his female figures are less…well, Rubenesque.

Not entirely appreciated in his own time, his work was later dubbed a precursor to Expressionism and Cubism.

If you never learn to recognize one of El Greco’s paintings simply from its style, don’t feel bad. Scholars have been unable to classify him in any known school of art.

He wasn’t a celebrated painter in his own time and produced only 34 paintings, but was rediscovered in the 19th century.

Because his paintings are so proportionally perfect and detailed, art historians have theorized that he used a camera obscura to project images onto his canvas rather than starting with his own sketch.