Every Painting in Beyonce and Jay Z's Louvre Video
In May 2018, Beyonce and Jay Z filmed the video Apeshit inside the Louvre over two nights, released it that June, and put around seventeen of the museum's works on screen.
The museum was closed to the public while they shot, and the Louvre later published an official walking tour of the works that appear.
The camera does not wander. It keeps landing on pictures about power, conquest and who is allowed to be looked at, and the last painting it shows is a portrait of a Black woman.
Here are twelve of those paintings, what is actually in them, and how critics have read their place in the video. Three famous sculptures appear too.
1. Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa
The couple stand with their backs to her, facing us, and she looks over their shoulders. That reversal is the whole video in one shot.
About thirty thousand people a day file past this small poplar panel, most of them holding a phone. Leonardo carried it with him to France and never delivered it to the man who commissioned it.
She only became the most famous painting on earth after she was stolen in 1911 by an Italian handyman, and I explain that in Why is the Mona Lisa so famous.
2. Jacques Louis David, The Coronation of Napoleon
Thirty two feet of imperial theater, and the video parks a row of dancers in front of it. Napoleon crowns his own wife because he had already crowned himself.
David shows the Pope raising a hand in blessing, a change made, according to the traditional account, at Napoleon's insistence, because the picture had to look sanctioned.
Napoleon's mother sits in the tribune watching the ceremony. She was not there. She had refused to come, and he had her painted in anyway.
3. Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the Medusa
A raft of dying men, and at the very top, waving the rag that will save them, a Black sailor. The Louvre hangs it near the Coronation, and the video cuts between the two: a state ceremony and the wreck that state produced.
The frigate Medusa ran aground off Africa in 1816 because its captain owed his command to politics. The officers took the boats. A hundred and forty seven people went onto the raft and fifteen came back.
The full story of that wreck is worse than the painting lets on.
4. Jacques Louis David, The Oath of the Horatii
Three brothers throw out their arms to swear they will kill or die for Rome, and the women collapse in a heap on the right. Painted in 1784, five years before the Revolution, it became the visual grammar of Neoclassicism, and David himself would later vote for the execution of the king.
In the video, dancers hold the same locked arm pose in front of it. Their bodies quote the oath while swearing nothing to France.
5. Jacques Louis David, The Intervention of the Sabine Women
A woman throws herself between two armies with her babies at her feet and stops a war. David painted it after coming out of prison, jailed twice as a supporter of Robespierre and freed under an amnesty, and he presented it as a plea for the French to stop killing each other.
He also painted the men fully naked, and defended that decision in a printed pamphlet before anyone could complain. Read it as a history painting and it is Roman legend.
Read it as autobiography and it is a man asking to be forgiven.
6. Jacques Louis David, Portrait of Madame Recamier
Two dancers lie on the gallery floor in the pose of Juliette Recamier, twenty three years old, barefoot on a sofa against an empty background.
David left it unfinished after Recamier grew tired of waiting and commissioned his pupil Gerard instead, whose version she preferred.
The sofa launched a furniture craze that still carries her name. Her husband was a banker, in a Paris whose banking world overlapped with the colonial economy.
The video puts two Black dancers where the socialite reclined, and lets the shot make the point.
7. Paolo Veronese, The Wedding at Cana
The largest painting in the Louvre, about sixty seven square meters of feast, hanging directly opposite the Mona Lisa where almost nobody turns around to look at it.
Veronese painted a biblical miracle as a Venetian party, put musicians in the foreground who are traditionally identified as himself and Titian, and buried Jesus in the middle of the crowd.
Napoleon's troops cut it out of its monastery refectory in Venice in 1797 and rolled it up. It has never gone home.
8. Eugene Delacroix, Apollo Slaying the Serpent Python
The video opens looking up at a ceiling, at a god on a chariot killing a snake in a storm of light. Delacroix painted it in 1851 in the Galerie d'Apollon, the room Louis XIV built as a hymn to himself as the sun.
It is also where the French crown jewels are kept. Opening a rap video under a monarch's private ceiling, in the room of the crown jewels, is the kind of choice critics spent the following week unpacking.
9. Theodore Gericault, The Charging Chasseur
A Napoleonic cavalry officer twists on a rearing horse, and the battle behind him is already lost. Gericault was twenty one when he showed it at the Salon of 1812, and it is a picture of an empire at the moment it tips over.
He would die at thirty two from injuries after falls from horses, the animal he had painted all his life.
10. Ary Scheffer, The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca
Two lovers drift naked through the second circle of hell, locked together forever, while Dante and Virgil watch from the dark. Scheffer painted the couple Dante meets in the Inferno, damned for a kiss they took while reading a book about a kiss.
He worked the composition up in 1835 and repeated it for years; the version in the Louvre dates from 1855. It was one of the most copied images of the nineteenth century, and putting it in a video made by a married couple who had aired their troubles in public was read, at the time, as anything but neutral.
11. Rosso Fiorentino, Pieta
A dead Christ with a ginger beard slumps across his mother's knees, limbs stretched to the edge of what a body can do. Rosso was a Florentine Mannerist who took a job at the French court and helped invent the whole Fontainebleau style, painting for the same king who had bought the Mona Lisa.
He died in France in 1540. Vasari wrote that he poisoned himself, a claim modern historians treat with suspicion.
12. Marie Guillemine Benoist, Portrait of Madeleine
This is the last painting the video shows. A young Black woman sits in a white dress, gaze level, painted in 1800 by a woman, six years after France first abolished slavery and two years before Napoleon restored it.
For two centuries she was catalogued simply as a Black woman. Her name, Madeleine, was restored in 2019 through the research behind the Musee d'Orsay exhibition on Black models in French art.
Beyonce's dancers stand before her in silence. More of the old masters were women than the labels ever admitted.
Apeshit at the Louvre, the questions worth asking
How many artworks are in the Apeshit video? Around seventeen, including the Mona Lisa, the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Venus de Milo and the Great Sphinx of Tanis.
Did the Louvre allow the filming? Yes. It was shot over two nights with the museum closed, and the Louvre later published an official Apeshit walking tour.
What is the last painting in the video? Marie Guillemine Benoist's Portrait of Madeleine, 1800, a portrait of a free Black woman painted by a woman.
Why the Louvre and not another museum? It holds the Western canon, in which Black sitters were rarely given a portrait of their own. Critics read the video as a claim on that canon.
Did visitor numbers really rise? Yes. The museum named the video among the reasons for its 2018 attendance.
If this video pulled you in, you will love these too:
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Who gets to stand there
The paintings the camera chooses are all, in one way or another, about who holds power and who is allowed to be looked at. Critics read the answer in the framing: dancers placed in front of each canvas, holding the poses of the figures inside it, and Madeleine last, because she was already on the wall and went unnamed for two hundred years.
In 2018 the Louvre counted 10.2 million visitors, the highest in its history, and named the video among the reasons.