Artists beginning with A

African masks - read more hereAlbrecht Altdorfer - The Battle of Issus (1529)

Armies clash like a crowd of gold and red ants between sapphire sea and vertigo-inducing sky in this apocalyptic masterpiece. Transposing the mayhem of Reformation Germany onto Alexander the Great's ancient battle with Darius III, it is a timeless hallucination of war's shining nightmare. Jonathan Jones

Ancient Americas - read more hereCarl Andre - Equivalent VIII (1966)

The Tate's decision to buy Carl Andre's rectangular arrangement of pale firebricks stacked, uncemented, in two neat layers provoked one of Britain's most notorious art controversies back in 1972. But it's a work of simple plain beauty, finding proportion and geometry in the humblest things. (JJ)

Fra Angelico - San Marco frescoes (1438-1445)

The plain white vaulted cells of Dominican monks are reflected in haunting views painted by the holiest Renaissance master. Spartan religious stories compel meditation. An Annunciation scene shows atop a staircase like a monk's vision. (JJ)

Sofonisba Anguissola - Portrait of the Artist's Three Sisters with Their Governess (1555)

Three young women are playing chess in a garden — the eldest looking out as she moves a piece, while her youngest sister laughs as the middle sister prepares to checkmate. This funny everyday scene is a rare painting by a Renaissance woman. (JJ)

Antonello da Messina - Virgin Annunciate (c1465)

A young woman in a blue veil looks up from her book at something we can't see; she puts out her right hand gently, as if catching the invisible breath of the Holy Spirit. Antonello is said to have made a perilous journey from southern Italy to Bruges tolearn from Flemish painters; here he applies their new styles of portraiture to a religious work to create an Annunciation focused entirely on Mary's face and gesture — a beautiful, daring masterpiece. (JJ)

Nobuyoshi Araki - Sentimental Journey (1971)

Dirty old voyeur or one of the most prolific and aesthetically commanding photo-artists in the world? Araki shifts, in a blink of his camera lens, from tied-up nudes to close-up bouquets, from the baroque neon glow of Tokyo nightlife to picnics of blossom-watching. Sentimental Journey is a heartbreaking series of typically revealing images of his dying wife's final days. Robert Clark

Diane Arbus - Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, NYC (1962)

Diane Arbus brought new subjects into view: those on the margins, the misfits, the geeks and, as she called them, the freaks. In her influential redefinition of photography's boundaries, the images are devoid of empathy but full of uncomfortable intrigue. A gawky boy plays with a toy grenade, and the result is explosively unsettling. Elisabeth Mahoney

Arcimboldo - Winter (1573)

The deep knot in a gnarled tree stump becomes a dark eye; two pale fungi form lips; green ivy reveals signs of life in a hairy tangle of dry grey branches. This Habsburg court artist's genius for finding faces in the natural world fascinated the surrealists. (JJ)

Armenian (c915-921) - Reliefs on facade of Church of the Holy Cross 

King Gagik, a 10th century Armenian ruler, is portrayed in robes decorated with curling arabesques among holy personages, animals and a banquet. The timeworn reliefs on this church in Turkey bear witness to a lost population. (JJ)

Hans Arp - Horloge (1924)

The roly-poly painted wooden blobs of Arp's art prove that abstraction does not have to be serious. His playful works are at once reliefs, assemblages and paintings, with a delight in chance and a pleasure in the visual that make them joyous and liberating. (JJ)

Antonin Artaud - Self-Portrait (1946), Portrait of Jany de Ruy (1947)

Better known for his Theatre of Cruelty manifestos and a lifetime's poetic railing against the evil spirits of mediocrity, Artaud, at the very end of his life, created some of the most incisive portrait drawings of the 20th century. Ravaged by years of electroshock, Artaud's once so beautiful face emerges in his Self-Portrait from a tremulous web of insectile scratchings. In pained states of rage and elation, he pictures his supportive friends as fellow victims of the insensate mob. Artaud really believed that drawing was a ritual of self-creative and self-protective magic, and it shows. (RC)

Kutlug Ataman - Küba (2005)

Viewers are confronted by a cacophony of voices, as 40 residents of a shanty town in Istanbul recount their life stories on TV monitors. Kutlug Ataman's provocative installation reveals the humanity in a hidden and abused society. Jessica Lack

Eugène Atget - Maison de la Matrîse de Saint-Eustache (1902)

Atget's is the photography of the flâneur. Wandering about the dilapidated backstreets of fin de siècle Paris, he came across the most exquisite atmospheric loveliness in the form of the crumbling plaster walls of rag-and-bone yards and open air urinals. It's a textured world, full of shabby charms and enticing shadows. (RC)

Aztecs and Incas - read more here