In June 2018, Beyonce and Jay Z danced in front of the Louvre's best known walls for a music video. The camera gives each painting a few seconds. Behind one of them sits a young woman whose name went unrecorded for more than two centuries, and she is far from the only canvas on screen with a story the video leaves out.
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Apeshit is the music video Beyonce and Jay Z filmed inside the Louvre and released in June 2018. The Louvre later published a trail of the seventeen works seen on screen, and thirteen of them are paintings. They become the set of the song.
Each canvas gets a few seconds in the video. I kept the twelve whose story adds what the camera cannot show: the event behind the picture, the person who sat for it, or the choice the painter made against what was expected.
A thread runs through them. Seven of the twelve were painted between 1784 and 1819, the years of the Revolution, of Napoleon and of the return of the kings to France. The other five stretch from the early 1500s to 1851.
12. Marie Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of a Black Woman (1800)
Straight out of the canvas, at eye level, a young Black woman looks back at whoever stands in front of her. She sits in a white dress, a white cloth wrapped around her head, her chest and arms bare, with a blue shawl thrown over the armchair behind her. Marie Guillemine Benoist painted her in Paris in 1800 and showed the portrait at the Salon that year.
The Salon catalogue gave the sitter no name, only a label based on the color of her skin, and the Louvre still lists the canvas as Portrait of a Black Woman. More than two centuries passed before anyone proposed a name. In 2019 the art historian Anne Lafont suggested that the woman was Magdeleine, a servant who had come from Guadeloupe to work for Benoist's in-laws.
No archive has confirmed it, so the Louvre treats the name as a proposal, while many people now call the picture Portrait of Madeleine. Whoever she was, the date of the portrait gives her story its weight. France abolished slavery by decree in February 1794, and Napoleon restored it in 1802. Benoist painted this woman in the eight years between.
Benoist had trained with Jacques-Louis David, whose canvases fill four places on this list, and from him she kept the plain background and the clean outline. Against that bare ground nothing competes with the sitter's gaze, and to me it matters most, because it is the one thing the catalogue label could not take away.
At a Glance
Artist: Marie Guillemine Benoist (1768 to 1826)
Painted: 1800
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 81 × 65 cm (32 × 26 in)
Where to see it: Louvre, Paris
11. Rosso Fiorentino, Pieta (about 1530 to 1540)
A dead Christ lies across the foreground of this Pieta, with Saint John, Mary Magdalene and a veiled woman crowding in around him. Rosso Fiorentino painted it in France in the 1530s, for one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. Behind the body, the Virgin is on her feet with her arms flung wide, in a scene where she is supposed to hold her son.