Two paintings vie for the top spot in Western art history, earning them pride of place on countless postcards, posters, and tote bags among other forms of merchandise and mass media incarnations. One is Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, the other, Edvard Munch’s The Scream.Each represents its respective era through the sheer force of facial expression. Mona Lisa’s famously ambiguous smile is fixed to a surface that is seamless and serene—crystalline yet conjured from smoke and mist; Munch’s protagonist has tiny coals for eyes and a maw of horror for a mouth, a vertically elongated oval echoed by frenetic lines. Leonardo’s masterpiece reflects a faith in humanism, naturalism, and classicism; Munch’s, the unraveling of same by the Industrial Revolution.But there is more to The Scream, historically speaking, than just the context in which it arose. The Mona Lisa represents an impossible ideal—palpable, yet clearly beyond reach. The Scream, on the other hand, arguably speaks to a much more ancient, existential state, connecting to the fears—psychological and physical—that have haunted mankind from its beginnings. Its timelessness is on a whole other order than Leonardo’s masterpiece, finding truth to nature by tying it to the authentic expressions of the human condition.The Scream, whose earliest version was painted in 1893, is arguably the first modern painting, though many would credit Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). But while Les Demoiselles signaled a radical break with the Renaissance paradigm epitomized by La Gioconda, The Scream manifested modernity through the subjective frame of feelings, making concrete the sense of alienation and anomie that would come to define life in the 20th century.Ironically, that wasn’t Munch’s intent, even as The Scream provided the inspiration for much of the art that would follow, especially Expressionism. Instead, Munch’s work developed within the context of Symbolism, which abandoned art-for-art’s-sake formalism for dreamlike allegories. Munch followed suit up to a point. He once said, “From the moment of my birth, the angels of anxiety, worry, and death stood at my side.” His childhood was marked by chronic ailments, the untimely demise of a sibling, and a fear of falling victim to a family history of mental illness—all of which contributed to Munch’s neurotic temperament.Accordingly, themes of mortality, melancholy, and anxiety consistently haunted his compositions, which were often distinguished by soft, ectoplasmic figures suspended in time and space. The Scream was exemplary in this respect, with its wraithlike figure standing on a bridge as he howls under an infernal sky rendered in incandescent bands of orange and crimson. His body snakes as if it were a flame at the end of a flickering candle, registering his consumption by fear physically as well as psychologically. Two indistinct figures stand in the background, oblivious to his agony.Munch’s transformation of the emotional into the palpable also owed something to the Romanticists, who’d swept across the Continent in the early 19th century as a reaction to the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason. Their aesthetic was built on passion, most conspicuously in the notion of the sublime. The sublime as a construct dates back to Greece during the first century AD, where it referred to exceptionalism. But it was the 18th-century British philosopher Edmund Burke who defined the concept the Romanticists embraced—namely, nature’s power to elicit terror and awe in the beholder.It was exactly this experience that Munch captured. “I was walking along a path with two friends,” he wrote, when “suddenly the sky turned blood . . . [with] red tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city. . . . I stood there trembling with anxiety, and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.” The Scream, then, is a document of Munch’s epiphany, with its overwhelmed character standing in for himself.Still, it isn’t the mouth and eyes that necessarily convey The Scream’s meaning, but rather the clapping of the figure’s hands over his ears in a futile effort to block out an unbearable sound. Over time this crucial aspect of the painting has largely been supplanted by the idea that it captures a wider existential and societal breakdown.The Scream has been the subject of countless conjectures. Some have claimed that it’s a self-portrait of Munch having a panic attack or that it may have been inspired by the proximity of a lunatic asylum to the painting’s setting overlooking Oslo. Others have focused on the cause of the blood-red sky above, with fallout from the volcanic eruptions on the Indonesian island of Krakatoa (which caused cooling temperatures and lurid sunsets across the globe) fingered as one culprit, and polar stratospheric clouds over Norway as another. Finally, the figure itself was supposedly taken from a shriveled Peruvian mummy exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, which also saw the debut of the Eiffel Tower. Though the object does bear a startling resemblance to Munch’s creation, there’s no record of his having seen it, though Paul Gaugin, a friend and mentor, apparently did.What is known for sure is that between 1893 and 1910, Munch produced five versions of The Scream, two in oil and two in pastel along with a lithographed edition. Three in particular had notable brushes with notoriety.There was, for instance, the blatant theft of the earliest version of the painting, an oil and tempera composition on cardboard (known as the “Waxy Scream” because Munch had spilled wax on it) from the National Gallery in Oslo in February 1994. With the country distracted by the Winter Olympics held in Norway that year, the robbers brazenly propped a ladder against a window at the museum to snatch The Scream. The piece was eventually recovered.Ten years later, another version of The Scream was stolen at gunpoint in broad daylight from the Munch Museum in Oslo. That, too, was retrieved, thanks to a generous bounty offered for its return—along with the promise of two million M&Ms by the candy’s maker, Mars, Inc., to literally sweeten the deal.Most famously, a pastel iteration of The Scream fetched $120 million at a Sotheby’s auction in 2012, making it the most expensive painting ever sold up to that point (it would be dethroned five years later). Another, less well-known fact about the pastel’s history was that it had been hidden in a Norwegian barn during World War II while its owners decamped to Britain for the duration.That conflict and the one proceeding it helped to turn Munch’s neurasthenic take on the sublime into what it’s become today: a signifier of our inability to grapple with unspeakable monstrosities. That its import still broadcasts from under layers of pop-cultural accretions speaks to the enduring power of Munch’s vision.