You can learn here about great figures from history who have been celebrated in art: Sir Isaac Newton, George Friederic Handel, Alexander the Great, Albert Einstein.
In contrast you can see those whose names have been forgotten but whose images survive: a fashionable young man brilliantly painted by Frans Hals, the audience of a 19th century London Music Hall captured by Walter Sickert, the dying victims of Napoleon's Russian expedition imagined by Géricault.
And see how certain artists have represented themselves: Maarten van Heemskerck's sober self portrait before the Roman Colosseum, and Sir Stanley Spencer's remarkably frank image of himself with his lover.
