It is astonishing to see how art draws its inspiration from itself, again and again. Already in ancient times painters stole recurring motifs from their competitors, which gave rise to the Corinthian style and to numerous frescoes, some of which have survived. Later, in the 15th and 16th centuries, Flemish painters were honoured for the purity of their oil paintings and the innovation of their technique: this was the case of Jan Van Eyck and Vermeer, for example. Later it was the neoclassical painters who took up both the themes and models of antiquity. Coinciding with the discovery of Herculaneum and the exhumation of buried statues and ceramics, a veritable frenzy of interest in antiquity swept through the European upper classes and aristocracy of the time. Art, furniture and fashion were inspired by the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity.

But there were not only these respectful tributes, and there were also many pastiches to denigrate the works of the masters. The most recent version of this is perhaps the Instagram account Classic Art Memes, which floods the net with classical paintings turned into abstruse contemporary scenes, or the 3D animations of classical art masterpieces in the short programmes of the television channel Arte.

It now seems illegitimate to claim to be avant-garde, to know one's art history classics and to produce a work of art that does not refer to previous works, or to a global artistic movement, such as the Bauhaus in architecture, Dadaism or abstraction in sculpture and painting. Of course, this injunction must be nuanced and understood from a distance, and one should not hesitate to draw inspiration from and question previous artistic creations. 

Will you be able to recognise them all? Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl, Rodin's The Thinker, Delacroix's Freedom Leading the People, Titian's Venus of Urbino, Cézanne's Card Players, Monet's Water Lilies, Duchamp's Fountain... so many masterpieces that seep through the works selected by Artsper. Often comical, the artists hosted by our partner galleries have not finished surprising you. Homages, pastiches, winks, borrowings or quotations... these works claim a reference to the past of art history. A past that is constantly being updated through contemporary art and that condenses the pioneering theories of artistic revolutions. Avant-gardists, revolutionaries, dissidents... the ancestral figures of the artistic field continue to mark the minds and the brushes.

Artsper zooms in on these works that weave their webs over the paintings that have shaped the face of art history and still fascinate artists and collectors today.