Tells the life-story of the painting more widely reproduced than any other, even the Mona Lisa. It shows exactly how and why the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch arrived at his extraordinary image and how that image of the screaming person has reverberated down the decades to become an icon in modern culture.

Michelangelo's David is one of the marvels of Renaissance art, yet was carved from a block of marble that was so shallow that two other master sculptors had declared it unusable. This tells just how Michelangelo cracked the problems and how his statue came to symbolise much more than David's victory over Goliath.

Botticelli's painting is extraordinarily beautiful; his portrayal of Flora, the central character, reveals a face you might find in London or Bologna or Boston today. But what the painting is about is a mystery which scholars devote their lives to solving. It is rich is sex, even rape, but it also about love and the highest aspirations of man.

Among the greatest of all depictions of battle, these three panels were break throughs in painting technique, so that contemporaries must have viewed them in awe. Also they were the victims of an audacious art crime.

The story of probably the most renowned painting in the world. The Last Supper revolutionized Western art and its power reverberates to this day in the courts and the bookshops and cinemas. Just how Leonardo Da Vinci broke with traditions in creating his supremely dynamic masterpiece is recounted, together with the tale of his disastrous attempt to use a new technique in wall-painting.

The first moment in the Christmas story is the arrival of the Archangel Gabriel to tell Mary that she has been chosen to give birth to the son of God. Many painters have depicted this event, none better than the great Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck. As befits a man who seems to mixed espionage in with painting for his patron, Eyck’s picture is full of symbols and half-concealed messages. It has an extraordinary after-life - sold by the Soviets against the wishes of the Hermitage and bought by a secretive American millionaire who hid it away in a cellar.