Perhaps the most celebrated of all Japanese pictures, the Great Wave's portrayal of a huge wave about to overwhelm three boats was only produced by Hokusai when he was old and broke and needed money badly. A print that cost little more than bowl of noodles to those who first bought it, the image has been hugely influential on later art.

Why should a painting of a group of part-time Amsterdam militiamen, dressed up for an occasion that wasn't serious anyway, have become the most revered painting in Holland? The full story of Rembrandt's masterpiece.

The great revolutionary masterpiece, painted by a man who soon complained that revolutions got in the way of dinner parties. Shunned by the government of the day, it has endured to become the symbol of the French republic and an icon of later revolutions.

The stark portrait, mainly in greys and black, that James McNeill Whistler painted of his mother is now a picture that is widely lampooned as a portrait of a prim Victorian lady. She is shown smoking reefers, wearing trainers, having a tatoo. But Whistler's approach was revolutionary in its time, wholly departing from the Victorian tradition of sentimental narrative painting. His relationship with his mother was also an intriguing study in contrasts.

Two men sitting on the grass, with a picnic nearby. They are not looking at a naked woman seated nearby, who stares brazenly out of the canvas at the viewer. In the background a second woman is doing something hard to quite see. Just what is going on? The full story of the painting that many believe is the beginning of modern art.

The Private Life of an Easter Masterpiece. Six hundred years ago, one painting in northern Europe was prized above all others. Queens and kings wanted to own it. Other and lesser painters endlessly copied it. Anyone who saw it was struck with awe. The painting was huge and overwhelming - the Descent from the Cross. The painter was a Flemish master, Rogier Van Der Weyden. Today it is one of the greatest masterpieces in Spain's National Gallery, the Prado, in Madrid. It was taken there by Philip II of Spain and survived great adventures - almost lost at sea, almost destroyed by German bombers in the Spanish Civil War. Recently Google Earth went inside a gallery for the first time - they chose the Prado and then the Descent from the Cross. Only today can the highest resolution digital cameras capture the amazing attention to detail of Van Der Weyden's paintbrush.

Arguably the most powerful painting about war ever achieved. It portrays the slaughter of civilians after Napoleonic troops entered Madrid in 1808. The programme reveals the historical truths behind the painting and shows exactly how Goya achieved this masterpiece of protest.

No description available

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.

Perhaps the most reproduced of all 19th century paintings, The Sunflowers has a story that lies at the crux of the complex relationship between Van Gogh and Paul Gaugin. The programme reveals how Van Gogh started to paint sunflowers soon after he moved from Holland to Paris and how they became the emblem of his embrace of Southern France, warmth and the sun. It looks especially at the 8th of the Sunflower paintings, the one in the National Gallery in London which is arguably the best in the series. It was most admired and desired by Gaugin but denied to him by Van Gogh as their relationship deteriorated.

A popular masterpiece and yet an enduring enigma. It seems to show a quiet scene in a Paris park but there are hints at the demi-monde, if you know where to look. The most remarkable aspect of this vast canvas however remains Seurat's technique his revolutionary pointillism.

The Scream 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.

This painting was once described as the most beautiful of all the artworks of the 19th century. Certainly it seems the happiest. But beneath renoir's joyful portrayal of working class Parisians at leisure is another, darker story.

No description available

Of all Vermeer's paintings, it was probably this picture that he held in greatest esteem. It was the painting he used to show off his skills to customers. A customer three centuries after he died was none other than Adolf Hitler

No description available

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.

She's been called 'the most smackable bum in art'. Velazquez's portrait of a young woman lying naked on a couch gazing at her reflection in a mirror held by Cupid has an extraordinary story

No description available

'My Brothel' is the title that Picasso gave to his masterwork Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the painting of five towering prostitutes that began the art of the twentieth century. It was a work that shocked even his friends when they first saw it, with one saying that Picasso would be found hanged behind it one day. The programme relates how the painting grew out of a fierce rivalry between Matisse and Picasso and just why it was and remains so revolutionary.

One of the most sensual of paintings, achieved in the extraordinary intellectual climate of turn of the century Vienna by a male artist of prodigious sexual appetite. Yet it may portray the shift of sexual power towards the female.

The statue of the young girl in a real ballet dress is often seen today just as a pretty image of dancer making one of the classic moves of ballet. But to the people who first saw the statue when it was unveiled it was a dangerous, even disgraceful, portrayal of a degenerate girl little more than a whore. The programme reveals the story of the real woman who Degas used as a model and includes revelations about how the statue as actually made.