Artists beginning with G (part two)

El Greco - The Burial of Count Orgaz (1586-1588), The Pentecost (c1596-1600), The Resurrection (late 1590s), A View of Toledo (c1597-1599)

Black, blue and silver fight it out in the sky above a city of grey palaces and churches on green rocky hills in El Greco's apocalyptic View of Toledo. Something is happening in that sky above the city where this Greek painter lived and worked. Heaven and hell, angels and demons, not physically visible — yet there, El Greco knows, just beneath the veil of appearances — are fighting for the city's soul in that great shuddering drama of light and cloud. Born on Crete, and trained as an icon painter in the Byzantine tradition, El Greco journeyed to Italy where he encountered the elongated, distorted forms of Mannerism and the mystical light of Tintoretto. In Spain, he found a religious culture perfectly attuned to the spiritual extremism of his art, which shatters conventions in its pale fire. (JJ)

Greek (c475BC) - Charioteer from Delphi

Commissioned by Polyzalus, Tyrant of Gela in Sicily, to commemorate a victory in the Olympic games, the charioteer was once part of what would have been an imposing group (now only fragments of his horses remain). The young bronze face is delicately beautiful; the folds of his chiton fall with simple severity. (CH)

Greek (c460BC) - Zeus with a Thunderbolt

Most Greek sculpture survives as Roman marble copies of the bronze originals, so when you come face to face with the real thing, it's incredibly impressive. This over-life-size Zeus, poised to hurl a thunderbolt, is all virile beard and finely honed musculature. (CH)

Greek (c450BC) - Bronze warriors

These two bearded, naked bronze warriors found in the sea off Riace, near Reggio, southern Italy, were perhaps originally produced to commemorate a Greek military victory. Like so much Greek sculpture, they were looted by the Romans after Greece became part of the empire. In this case, however, the loot never reached its destination, but sank with its ship — hence the survival of these statues (most Greek bronze sculptures were melted down and the metal reused). The modelling and naturalistic poses of these imposing warriors is staggering. Their teeth are of silver, their nipples of copper and their six-packs are to die for. (CH)

Greek (late 2nd century BC) - Aphrodite of Melos (Venus de Milo)

The figure is given a soft, S-shaped pose; the drapery — tantalisingly — seems about to drift free from her hips. This masterful, informal Aphrodite, discovered in 1820, is all seduction and dimpled flesh. (CH)

Greek (early 2nd century BC) - Winged Victory of Samothrace

You can practically hear the thrash of the wind through her beautiful, feathered wings. Her airborne speed has pressed her filmy, billowing chiton back against her body, revealing her nipples and navel. It is hard to grasp that this goddess is carved from stone. (CH)

Johann Grimonprez - Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y (1997)

Grimonprez's spectacular video history of airplane hijackings is terrifying, exhausting and compelling, especially since 9/11. A meditation on how reality is recorded in easily manipulated scraps of images, the film splices hijack footage with quotes from Don DeLillo against a throbbing backdrop of cheesy disco tunes and menacingly terrible cartoons. (EM)

Atkinson Grimshaw - In Peril (1879)

Grimshaw's landscapes narrowly escape the finicky mannerisms of the Victorian work-ethic through an accurate grasp of the transformative charisma of moonlight. In Peril is Scarborough in spooky mood, caught precipitously on the very edge of the deep-sea wilderness, well away from the amusement arcades. (RC)

Antoine-Jean Gros - Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa (1804)

This passionate enthusiast for Napoleon (unable to face Restoration France, Gros eventually killed himself) portrays his idol as a Christ-like figure walking among plague victims, in a stupendous painting whose Romanticism somehow makes the word "propaganda" seem petty. (JJ)

George Grosz - Pillars of Society (1926)

A beer-swilling, monocled lawyer with a swastika badge holds forth at the bar, a cavalry charge emerging from his head, while old soldiers rampage the streets setting buildings alight in their search for communists like Grosz. A priest blesses these stormtroopers of Germany's hell in this prophetic image. (JJ)

Matthias Grünewald - The Isenheim Altarpiece (c1509-1515)

You walk into a chilly stone chapel off the cloisters of a museum built into an old convent and there before you is Christ's horrifically emaciated, discoloured body, covered with sores, rotting even before it is taken down from the cross, fingers outstretched in agony. The landscape is a barren, rocky wasteland, the sky dead and black. This is your introduction to a multi-part altarpiece on wooden panels that were originally built to fold out of each other and which today are displayed so that all can be seen by walking the length of the chapel. It is nothing less than the Sistine Chapel of German art.

The altarpiece was created for an Antonine religious community that specialised in healing St Anthony's Dance, and as well as dictating its theme — the life and visions of St Anthony — the hospital setting seems to have licensed Grünewald's extreme imagery: the symptoms of sickness on Christ's body apparently resemble those associated with St Anthony's Dance. Yet the intensity of Grünewald's vision is his alone, and it is plainly the fruit of some terrible inner journey. The demons in his panel of The Temptation of St Anthony have a hallucinatory conviction — he has seen them. Yet his startling picture of the Resurrection is equally real in its ecstatic revelation: a golden-haired Christ rises in a cloud of glowing pink-and-blue draperies at the heart of a sun that appears in the depths of the darkest night. Modern German artists have revered Grünewald: the grotesques of Otto Dix and the bird demons of Max Ernst were born here. (JJ)

Philip Guston - Back View (1977)

Early in his career associated with abstract expressionism, in the late 1960s Guston adopted a figurative, almost cartoonish style for his highly textured oil paintings: they are dark, satirical, poignant, confessional, politically acute, with a sophisticated take on art history. And often very funny. (CH)