The Angel of North manifests an enduring belief in the power of art. Photograph: PA/Owen Humphrys.
Here it is. A month ago, I kicked off a discussion about the works of art that matter most . After a fascinating debate, or two, that revealed how deeply you feel about art, we now have a definitive list of the 50 works that demand to seen at least once in a lifetime.
These are the masterpieces worth a pilgrimage or, if you are lucky enough to live near one of them, an infinity of repeated viewings. Although be warned, as one sceptical contributor said: "Something isn't great because you've been told it is great..."
Those of you who have contributed lists and single recommendations displayed a magnificent seriousness. It shows how badly most reporting and commentary on art in newspapers lets down its readers, who are interested in so much more than who wins the Turner prize.
You crave the absolute and the supreme in art and are prepared to go a long way in search of it - from Tikal in Guatemala ("The setting is great - all covered in jungles and crawling with monkeys") to Constable country ("That countryside still exists, if only in snippets: sometimes it can be glimpsed between a motorway bridge and a little chef").
A few artists make it on to almost everyone's list: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Picasso. Michelangelo is the artist who inspires the greatest awe. "My head believes Darwin; my heart trusts Michelangelo," said one contributor, while another wrote - accurately - that David seems to breathe. Michelangelo still gets only one work on the list; it should be taken as read that all the works of listed artists are worth a look.
The special - possibly exaggerated - place that western culture has given to art and artists since Michelangelo's day means that if you love great art, you're going to spend a lot of time in Florence, Rome and Spain. Yet the most beautiful work of art in Spain, the Alhambra, is a north African work. "The walls and indeed the floors and ceilings are covered in tesselating abstract weaves that do one's head in," wrote an admirer of the exquisite Islamic masterpiece.
Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses - widely and rightly championed - prove it is still possible to make great art. Antony Gormley's Angel of the North manifests an enduring belief in art and its power, although I've never been convinced it lives up to its ambition. "Only when you stand underneath it do you realise how huge and then how beautiful it is... this is surely one the greatest examples of art that can only be appreciated up close, in person," says one contributor, putting me right.
Perhaps it doesn't matter so long as you find what you are looking for. One person contributed a sensitive and highly personal account of seeing Georgina Starr's video Crying. "It was euphoric I suppose. A release. Another piece of me wanted to climb through the screen and give her a cuddle. Tell her it would be OK." Crying hasn't made the list, but the type of experience the contributor described is what this project is about - the most intense encounters we have with art.
Everything listed here can sustain a long and living engagement, which means even the oldest (the Chauvet cave, painted 30,000 years ago) is contemporary. Great art is not so much timeless, as always timely.
The list, in no particular order
Piero della Francesca The Baptism of Christ (1450s), National Gallery, London
Antony Gormley The Angel of the North (1998), Gateshead
Masjid-i Shah (now Masjid-i Imam) Mosque (largely 1612-1630) Isfahan, Iran
JMW Turner Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway (exhibited 1844), National Gallery, London
Claude Monet Nymphéas (1914-1926), Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris
Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty (1970), Great Salt Lake, Utah
Tikal (AD300-AD869), Late Classic Maya site, Guatemala
Jackson Pollock One: Number 31, 1950, Museum of Modern Art, New York
John Constable The Hay Wain (1821), National Gallery, London
The Alhambra (mostly 14th century), Granada
Mark Rothko The Rothko Chapel (paintings 1965-66; chapel opened 1971), Houston, Texas
Matthias Grünewald The Isenheim Altarpiece (1509-1515), Musée Unterlinden, Colmar
Masaccio The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (c. 1427), Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence
Edvard Munch The Scream (1893), National Gallery, Oslo
Giotto Fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel (1305-1306), Padua
Vincent van Gogh The Starry Night (1889), Museum of Modern Art, New York
Terracotta Army of the First Qin Emperor (c. 210BC), Shaanxi province, China
Sandro Botticelli Primavera (1481-1482), Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Stonehenge (2950BC-1600BC), Salisbury Plain, UK
Limbourg brothers Les Très Riches Heurs du Duc de Berry (1413-1416), Musée Condé, Chantilly
The Book of Kells (c. AD800), Trinity College Library, Dublin
Ishtar Gate (c. 575BC), Pergamon Museum, Berlin
Pieter Pauwel Rubens Descent from the Cross (1611-1614), Antwerp Cathedral
Hieronymous Bosch The Garden of Earthly Delights (1505-1510), Prado, Madrid
Jan van Eyck The Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (c. 1435), Musée du Louvre, Paris
Jan Vermeer View of Delft (c. 1660-1661), Mauritshuis, the Hague
Caravaggio The Burial of St Lucy (1608), Museo di Palazzo Bellomo, Syracuse, Sicily
Rembrandt Aristotle with a Bust of Homer (1654), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Francisco Goya The Third of May 1808 (1814), Prado, Madrid
Edouard Manet The Dead Torero (1864), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Paul Cézanne Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves (1904-1906), Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow
Michelangelo Sistine Chapel ceiling and altar wall frescoes (1508-1541), Rome
Leonardo da Vinci The Adoration of the Magi (c. 1481), Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937), Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid
Titian Danaë (1544-1546), Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
Raphael The School of Athens (1510-1511), Stanza della Signatura, Vatican Palace, Rome
Parthenon Sculptures (Elgin Marbles) (c. 444BC), British Museum, London
Henri Matisse The Dance (1910), Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Théodore Géricault The Raft of the Medusa (1819), Louvre, Paris
Katsushika Hokusai Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1829-1833), series of woodblock prints, copies in major museums worldwide
Pieter Bruegel the Elder Hunters in the Snow (1565), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Ice Age paintings (about 30,000 years old) in the Chauvet Cave, Ardèche
Richard Serra Torqued Ellipses (1996), includes works on permanent view at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao
Jasper Johns Flag (1954-1955), Museum of Modern Art, New York
Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi The Annunciation (1335), Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Jean-Antoine Watteau Gilles (1718-1719), Louvre, Paris
Hans Holbein, The Dead Christ (1521-1522), Kunstmuseum, Basel
Diego Velázquez Las Meninas (1656), Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun (1333BC-1323BC), Egyptian Museum, Cairo
San Rock Art, South African National Museum, Cape Town, and at open air sites.
To see a gallery of selected highlights from this list, click here.
