1. Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born in Italy in 1452.The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world. Mona Lisa presumably was the wife of a Florantine merchant. Da Vinci used the technique called sfumato to paint the Mona LIsa, which, in Italian means "smoke". The background of the painting clearly expresses this technique with the landscape blending together as if mist lingers in the air.

Not only was Da Vinci a painter, he was also a scientist, engineer, mathematician, and writer, among others. This delving into many fields earned him the title of "Renaissance Man"-- a man who could truly master all fields.

Along with the Mona Lisa, Da Vinci is also famous for his works, The Last Supper, and the Vitruvian Man, which shows the porportions of the male body.

2. Michelangelo

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was an Italian contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1475. He was known as The Divine Michelangelo because he truly perfected his art.

Michelangelo is known as both a painter and a sculptor, as we can see by two of his most famous works: the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and his very well-known sculpture of David.

In order to perfect his sculptures, he would dissect corpes in order to study the complex anatomy of man, to be recreated in stone.

If you are lucky enough to travel to Rome in your lifetime, you must visit the Sistine Chapel. The entire gigantic ceiling was painted by Michelangelo alone, in the fresco style. He painted the Biblical scenes of the Creation, the Flood, and the Fall of Man all while lying on his back!

3. Claude Monet

Claude Monet was born in France in 1840. Monet, being very keen in capturing nature, and especially sunlight in known as the Father of the Impressionism Movement. Intent on capturing the way sunlight played with nature, most of his work deals with outdoor light. He painted in sunshine, wind, and rain.

This acquiring of the impression light makes on nature, along with his famous work Impression: Soleil Levant gave credit to the artistic style which captured the age.

4. Vincent van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh, a Dutch painter, was born in 1853. He is considered to be in the school of the Late-Impressionist painters.

During van Gogh's lifetime, he sold hardly any of his pictures and lived in relative poverty, also dealing with mental illness. He is today considered one of the world's greatest painters.

While living in Paris, Vincent met many of the Impressionist painters and was inspired by their work, and later took what he had gleaned and combined it to create his own style.

Van Gogh is most famous for his Vase with Sunflowers, a painting filled with yellows, oranges, and ochres, set adrop a torquoise background.

His most famous work is Starry Night, a night-time scene which pulls you in amongst swirls of stars in the evening sky.

5. Pablo Picasso

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born in Spain in 1881. Picasso is the founder of the art style cubism, seeing life differently that the Realist painters of his day. He approached art with a very child-like fascination.

Picasso was a genius of capturing moods, using colors, like blue and pink to set tones to his work.

One of his most famous works is called Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which depicts five nude women, and some fruit. The lines in the painting are very geometric and two dimensional. This painting is one of the most famous of the Cubism Movement.

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