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Olafur Eliasson – The Weather Project (2003)

The sun filled the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall and drew crowds to experience a cosmic vision in this sublime installation that brought the outside world inside. Romantic sun-lovers like Turner and Friedrich haunt Eliasson's embracing, dream-inciting art.

JMW Turner – Dido building Carthage (1815)

The white-hot orb of Turner's sun burns into your mind as you contemplate this golden scene. In North Africa's heat, Queen Dido is building a city destined to be destroyed in its wars with Rome. At this moment of hope and creation, at the dawn of a history, the sun radiates light and life everywhere.

Raphael – The Mond Crucifixion (c 1502-3)

I love the childlike way Raphael depicts the sun and moon as personified faces in the sky in this otherwise lifelike painting. While the blue sky fades to white on the horizon with an attention to real light, he imagines the cosmos in a completely mythic way. This is the universe as it was imagined in the middle ages, with the sun suspended over a flat earth.

Claude Monet – Impression, Sunrise (1872)

The smoky light of early morning is shot through with red and purple in Monet's intensely atmospheric painting of a moment, a mood. Like a Wagnerian prelude, his sensual reverie promises some grandeur to come – not an opera, but simply the ordinary drama of another day.

Caspar David Friedrich – Woman Before the Rising Sun (1818-20)

A potent sense of nature worship infuses this German Romantic hymn to the sun. The woman is hailing the sun as if it were a god. Her back is turned to us and we can only imagine the rapture in her eyes. By silhouetting her against the fiery sky Friedrich suggests she is becoming one with light, emptying herself into its blazing void.

Giovanni Bellini – The Agony in the Garden (c 1465)

No one had ever painted the dawn light with such acute observation when Bellini depicted Christ on the morning of his arrest. The landscape in the distance is clearly a north Italian hill town, and there can be no doubt Bellini spent cold mornings waiting for the first light so he could know what that morning sun looked like. Long before Monet, this is the first Impression, Sunrise.

Egyptian, Amarna Period – Berlin Stele with Akhenaten and Nefertiti (1300s BC)

The Aten – the divine disc of the sun – shines its rays on pharaoh Akhenaten and queen Nefertiti in this monument to sun worship. Akhenaten was a free-thinking ruler of Egypt who introduced a new religion, dedicated to the Aten, and a new artistic style, dedicated to reality. Here the realistically portrayed rulers of Egypt sit in the glory of the sun.

James Turrell – Deer Shelter Skyspace (2006)

The sun's light is experienced in subtle and ever-changing ways in this permanent installation by James Turrell at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Sunlight creates intense atmospheres inside the subterranean skylit space, where the eye struggles to define the sky's boundaries. This is one of Turrrell's many Skyspaces that all reflect his vast artwork Roden Crater, a giant sky observatory in Arizona.

Maeshowe Chambered Cairn (c 3000 BC)

On midwinter's day, the weak northern sun casts a long line of light directly through the narrow entrance tunnel into the central stone chamber of this neolithic structure in Orkney, Scotland. It was evidently planned that way. Maeshowe is a solar artwork that collects the rays of the sun at their most remote, marking the moment the sun starts to get stronger and winter is half-over.

Wolfgang Tillmans – Lux (2009)

This beautiful photograph captures with luminous precision the baroque spectacle of the sun behind clouds. Artists including Rubens and Bernini have imitated such skies, such suns, in their religious masterpieces. Tillmans scientifically records the reality of nature's sublime ability to put on a show. Light is all.

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