Two white hands come up out of the Grand Canal at night, lit hard from above, with the moored gondolas under their blue covers sitting between them and the camera. The palazzo behind is doing what Venetian palazzi do at that hour, which is glow. Nobody in the frame. Just the hands, the boats, the water shivering the lights back at you. The piece is Lorenzo Quinn’s Support, installed against the corner of Ca’ Sagredo in May 2017 and left up until late November.

Five people lean on a parapet at Pena, in Sintra, looking out over the forest toward the coast. Nobody faces the camera. You see the backs of heads, a shoulder, the angle of a jaw, and past them the whole Atlantic plain going hazy in the light. If that composition feels familiar before you can say why, it should. It is one of the oldest tricks in European landscape painting, and the poster trade ran on it for a hundred years.

The lower dial of the Prague astronomical clock, lit up at night behind its bird netting. Twelve painted medallions of the months around the rim, twelve smaller zodiac roundels inside them, and the old town’s coat of arms sitting black and gold in the middle. An archangel with a sword on the left. A chronicler with an open book on the right. It looks like the most medieval object in central Europe.

Summer, sun almost overhead, shadows short and hard. This is the light every guide tells you to avoid, and it’s also the light you get if you’re standing in a Swedish archipelago town at one in the afternoon with a ferry to catch. So you work with it. The colour version of this frame would be pale render, a red-brown roof, blue sky. Pleasant and completely forgettable. Nothing in the scene depends on hue.

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.