Stand in one of the upper galleries and the room does all the work for you. Tall lancet windows throw cold daylight down a rough plaster wall. The roof is open timber. The floor is brick, worn to a warm red. A carved retable sits on a bracket at exactly the height an altarpiece would have sat, and a tapestry hangs beside it, and the whole arrangement reads as a room that has been standing since the fifteenth century.

Stand on the San Marco side of the Grand Canal, put the Rialto Bridge in the middle distance, let the palace fronts run away on both sides, and you have made a picture that was commercially standardised nearly three hundred years ago. The composition is not a discovery. It is an inheritance. The veduta, the topographical city view, became a Venetian export industry in the first half of the eighteenth century.

Draw the Louvre from memory. You will draw a triangle. Not the Cour Carrée, not the Grande Galerie, not the Renaissance wings that took four centuries and a dozen kings to assemble. A triangle with some lines through it, and if you are feeling thorough, a horizontal band of masonry behind it. That is a strange outcome for a building finished in 1989 against the loudest architectural opposition in modern French history.

The Cortile Nuovo at Palazzo Bo is a hard courtyard to photograph and an easy one to walk straight past. Most visitors to the University of Padua cross it on the way to the anatomical theatre and never look up. Look up and you get a travertine frieze of students going off to war, two lines of Latin cut into the wall beneath it, four big round arches, and a row of parked cars sitting under all of it.

There is no good place to stand in front of Notre-Dame de Fourvière. The parvis is shallow, the hill falls away behind you, and the façade is enormous. You back up until you run out of ground, and you’re still looking almost straight up. Every wide shot of this building has converging verticals in it. The only real decision is whether you pretend otherwise. I decided not to pretend. This is shot upward from the stairs, portrait orientation, sky cropped out entirely, and the lean is left in.

The big blue canvas reads as a burst of energy. Five figures, a green mound, a flat blue sky, almost no detail, the whole thing apparently thrown down in an afternoon. Visitors treat it that way. They stand back, take the picture, and move on with the impression that Matisse was a man who worked fast and got lucky. Then you turn around and there are the bronze heads on the plinth, the same subject remade over and over, each one further from the last.

Seen from beneath the iron footbridge that crosses the Saône at the foot of Fourvière hill, the church of Saint-Georges reads as the oldest thing in the frame. Buttresses, crockets, an openwork spire, lancets stacked in the tower stage — every signal points backward. It is in fact the newest building in the picture. The quay walls, the tall pastel apartment blocks on the far bank, the medieval and Renaissance fabric of Vieux Lyon a few hundred metres upstream: all of it predates the church.

The wall label gives the date with unusual precision: Paris, June to July 1914. Francis Picabia was working on a canvas over eight feet tall, filling it with pistons, tubing, gears and flesh, while the Austrian archduke was shot in Sarajevo and the ultimatums began moving between capitals. He finished it, or stopped working on it, at roughly the moment Europe committed itself. Within weeks he was in uniform. The painting is called I See Again in Memory My Dear Udnie, and it hangs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The proverb says lemonade. The proverb has clearly never been to the coast of France. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about lemons: on their own, they are a disaster. Sour, aggressive, structurally useless. You cannot build a life on a lemon. But put one next to six oysters and a cold glass of something white, and suddenly the lemon is not the problem — the lemon is the punchline, and the punchline is good.

There is a moment just before a bird moves when it becomes completely legible. Every feather settles. The eye fixes on something. The body gathers into itself. This painting catches a rose-ringed parakeet in exactly that moment — perched, alert, not yet gone. The painter is working in a mode that owes something to Gauguin and something to Matisse but belongs fully to neither. The sky behind the branches is not blue — it is lavender dissolving into pink, the kind of color that belongs to early evening in a warm climate when the light has gone indirect and the air holds heat without source.