Naysayers might suggest that ranking the hottest women in art is to miss the point, and to them we'd say, "What's it to you punk? Go away and draw a swan". We're not ranking them in terms of conventional aesthetic beauty -- we're ranking them in terms of their artistic merit.

In that spirit, we offer a gallery of the sexiest, hottest, most smoking femmes in the history of art. (Think of it as the opposite of EH Gombrich's Story of Art.)
 

The 19th-century French painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres had the right idea with "The Turkish Bath." Because sometimes all you need in life is a roomful of sweaty, naked women, including one whose job it is to jam on a guitar.
Fernando Botero was what you might call a BBW enthusiast. The Colombian artist loved painting larger ladies, and who are we to begrudge him the simple pleasures?
Italian painter Giorgione crafted "Sleeping Venus" back in 1510, when you could get away with a peep show provided you put a masterly landscape in there as well.
When Degas took a break from painting ballet dancers, he turned his attention to the naked female body. Even though we're not foot fetishists, we dig the shamelessly voyeuristic vibe of his work, "Nude Wiping Her Foot."
Ah, Picasso. All this talk of "cubism" is beside the point. We all know the man was painting what it's like to see the world through beer goggles.
Paul Gaugin is known for his classy portraits of Tahitian beauties. Tahiti is a cluster of islands that are way too expensive and full of sunburned honeymooners. Thanks to Gaugin, though, everyone thinks it's a bronze-skinned paradise where big-breasted women lounge on the beach all day.
Tom Wesselman borrowed the bright Pop Art aesthetic of the 60s and applied it to a subject we find so much more compelling than a can of meatballs.
If you threw a pair of short shorts on this girl in Van Gogh's "Nude Woman Reclining" (1887), you'd have the prototype for every American Apparel ad.
Renoir's "The Bathers" comes to mind every time we're hiking through the woods, daydreaming about discovering a group of five nude beauties enjoying a swim that totally won't mind if we watch them frolic.
Modigliani often refrained from giving his painted subjects eyeballs, which isn't that sexy a look. But he also gave us this stellar nude, with the most impossible hip-to-posterior ratio we've seen in a long time. Hard proof that Modigliani was an early proponent of junk in the trunk.
Egon Schiele's drawing style influenced generations of artists. It's possible that his hungry-looking model gave birth to heroin chic and, therefore, Kate Moss.