Leonardo da Vinci

Florence is where Leonardo's story begins, but few of his paintings have stayed there. The Uffizi holds the Annunciation and the haunting, unfinished Adoration of the Magi — abandoned when he left for Milan in 1482, its underpainting now more compelling than any finished work could be. The city shaped him, but he spent his most productive decades elsewhere.

Milan gave him the years he needed to go deep. He spent nearly twenty years there under Ludovico Sforza, and the result was The Last Supper — painted directly onto the wall of the refectory at Santa Maria delle Grazie, degrading since the day it was finished, still one of the most extraordinary things in Europe to stand in front of. The Pinacoteca Ambrosiana holds the Portrait of a Musician, one of only four universally accepted Leonardo portraits. Book months in advance for The Last Supper: there is no walk-up option.

The Louvre in Paris holds the greatest single concentration of his paintings — the Mona Lisa, the Virgin of the Rocks (a second version hangs in London's National Gallery), St John the Baptist, and the sublime Virgin and Child with St Anne. The Hermitage in St Petersburg holds two early Madonnas; the Czartoryski Museum in Kraków the Lady with an Ermine. With fewer than twenty paintings universally accepted as his, every encounter with an original carries extraordinary weight.