Greatest Painting of All Time

Five hundred years of painting, decided two at a time by people who are mostly not art historians. That is the appeal rather than the problem. Fame and quality have come apart badly in this field and the bracket cannot help but expose it. The Mona Lisa is the most recognised painting on Earth largely because it was stolen in 1911 and the theft ran in newspapers for two years. The Scream exists in four versions and the one people picture is not usually the one they have seen. Meanwhile Las Meninas is doing something with perspective and the position of the viewer that took three centuries to properly write about, and it will lose early rounds to things that photograph better.

There are thirty-two paintings in it, all of them old enough to be in the public domain, which is why the field stops where it does. There is no modern art here and that absence is a licensing constraint rather than a judgement.

What tends to happen is that recognition wins the first two rounds and something else takes over afterwards. By the semi-finals people are usually voting for the painting rather than for having heard of it.