Here it is - after a fascinating debate that revealed how deeply you feel about art, our definitive list of 50 works that demand to be seen at least once in a lifetime. Those of you who have contributed lists and single recommendations displayed a magnificent seriousness about art: you are interested in so much more than who won the Turner Prize.

You crave the absolute and the supreme, and are prepared to go a long way in search of it - from Tikal in Guatemala to Constable country. A few artists make it onto almost everyone's list: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Picasso - with Michelangelo the artist who inspires the greatest awe. "My head believes Darwin; my heart trusts Michelangelo," said one blogger.

The special (exaggerated?) place western culture has given 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.

Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses, widely championed, prove it is still possible to make great art today. Antony Gormley's Angel of the North manifests an enduring belief in art and its power - although personally I'm not convinced it lives up to its ambition.

Perhaps it doesn't matter, so long as you find what you are looking for. One writer contributed a 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." It hasn't made the list, but that type of experience is what this project was about - the most intense encounters we can 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 50 in full

1 Piero della Francesca, The Baptism of Christ (1450s), National Gallery, London.

Wonderful when it was various shades of gold; now it is cleaned it is fresh and luminous.

goldenoldie

2 Antony Gormley, The Angel of the North, Gateshead.

Has power from the motorway/train, but only when you stand underneath it do you realise how huge and then how beautiful it is.

squeezyhamster

3 Masjid-i Shah (now Masjid-i Imam) (largely 1612-30), Isfahan, Iran.

Spiritual, political and economic power, all in one town square. Exquisite tilework, stupendous colour.

silverdame

4 JMW Turner, Rain, Steam and Speed - the Great Western Railway (before 1844), National Gallery, London.

Jonathan, there isn't a single work by a British artist in your top 20. Surely Turner, at the very least, deserves to be in the first rank.

jamesc23

5 Claude Monet, Nymphéas (1914-1926), Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris.

6 Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970), Great Salt Lake, Utah.

An amazing work with references to North by Northwest, La Jetée, and a myth that the lake was connected to the sea by a whirlpool.

artvespa

7 Tikal (late classic Maya site, c AD300-869), Guatemala.

Any Mayan ruin would do, and the carvings on this one aren't so well preserved; but the setting is great - all covered in jungle and crawling with monkeys.

vayaecuador

8 Jackson Pollock, One: Number 31, 1950, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

9 John Constable, The Haywain (1821), National Gallery, London.

10 The Alhambra (mostly 14th century), Granada, Spain.

11 Mark Rothko, The Rothko Chapel (paintings, 1965-66; chapel opened, 1971), Houston, Texas.

12 Matthias Grünewald, The Isenheim Altarpiece (c 1509-15), Musée d'Unterlinden, Colmar, France.

13 Masaccio, The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise (c 1427), Brancacci Chapel, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence.

14 Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893), National Gallery, Oslo.

Trite, but angst in a nutshell.

cinequanon

15 Giotto, fresco cycle in the Scrovegni Chapel (1305-1306), Padua.

In terms of their influence on Italian art and the Renaissance in general, more important than anything by Michelangelo, Leonardo or Raphael.

Charl

16 Vincent van Gogh, The Starry Night (1889), Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Or Starry Night Over the Rhone - both always fill me with optimism.

boozysusy

17 The Terracotta Army of the First Qin Emperor (c 210BC), Shaanxi province, China.

18 Sandro Botticelli, Primavera (c 1481-1482), Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

19 Stonehenge (c 2950-1600BC), Salisbury Plain, Britain.

20 Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, 1413-16, Musée Condé, Chantilly.

Classic example of a medieval book of hours.

jabber

21 The Book of Kells, c AD800, Trinity College Library, Dublin.

22 Ishtar Gate (c 575BC), Pergamon Museum, Berlin.

23 Rubens, Descent from the Cross (1611-1614), Antwerp Cathedral.

Possibly not his best, but still magnificent and in its original setting. The weight of the task at hand fills the entire picture.

thor82

24 Hieronymus Bosch, The Garden of Earthly Delights (c 1505-10), Prado, Madrid.

No reproduction comes close to the colour/scale/downright weirdness.

cowfoot

25 Jan van Eyck, The Madonna With Chancellor Rolin (c 1435), Louvre, Paris.

26 Vermeer, View of Delft (c 1660-61), MauritsHuis, The Hague.

27 Caravaggio, The Burial of St Lucy (1608), Museo di Palazzo Bellomo, Syracuse, Sicily.

28 Rembrandt, Aristotle With a Bust of Homer (1654), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

29 Goya, The Third of May 1808, Prado, Madrid.

Also his Black Paintings - searingly beautiful, and it is hard not to make comparisons with politics today.

Anderson

30 Edouard Manet, The Dead Torero (1864), National Gallery of Art, Washington.

31 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire from Les Lauves (1904-6), Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow.

32 Michelangelo, ceiling and altar wall frescoes (1508-1541), Sistine Chapel, Rome.

Sheer awe.

JeremyK

33 Leonardo da Vinci, The Adoration of the Magi (c 1481), Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

34 Pablo Picasso, Guernica (1937), Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid.

35 Titian, Danaë (c 1544-6), Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples.

36 Raphael, The School of Athens (1510-11), Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Palace, Rome.

37 Parthenon Sculptures (Elgin Marbles, c 444BC), British Museum, London.

38 Matisse, The Dance (1910), Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, Russia.

39 Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa (1819), Louvre, Paris.

40 Katsushika Hokusai, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (c 1829-33) series of woodblock prints, copies in major museums worldwide.

41 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Hunters in the Snow (1565), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

42 Ice Age paintings in the Chauvet Cave, Ardèche (around 30,000 years old).

43 Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipses (1996), includes works on permanent view at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.

Magnificent - you cannot comprehend the physical effect until you stand in their presence.

Declan78

44 Jasper Johns, Flag (1954-55), Museum of Modern Art, New York.

45 Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, The Annunciation (1335), Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

46 Antoine Watteau, Gilles (c 1718-19), Louvre, Paris.

47 Hans Holbein, The Dead Christ (1521-22), Kunstmuseum, Basel.

48 Velázquez, Las Meninas (1656), Prado, Madrid.

49 The Gold Funerary Mask of Tutankhamun (1333-23BC), Egyptian Museum, Cairo.

50 San rock art, South African National Museum, Cape Town, and at open air sites.