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.

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.

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.