Nobody standing in the plaza in December is looking at the sculpture. They are looking at a tree, and behind it a limestone slab that goes up further than the phone can frame. But the block they are standing on holds the most ambitious coordinated art commission ever attempted on a private American site, executed by roughly thirty artists working to a single written program, and it has never really been repeated.

Two Balthus canvases hang at right angles in the same room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the pairing is quietly strange. One is a twelve-foot alpine panorama full of people. The other is a single figure in an airless bedroom. Eighteen years and an entire temperament separate them. The big one is The Mountain, finished in 1937, oil on canvas, about 249 by 366 centimetres. It was the largest thing Balthus had painted to that point, and he did it in a cramped Paris studio from memory.

Almost everything most people know about art, they know from reproductions. Not from standing in front of the object, but from a plate in a book, a slide in a lecture hall, a poster on a wall, a screen. André Malraux gave that condition a name in 1947 and called it the museum without walls: a collection nobody owns, assembled out of photographs, in which a Sumerian seal and a Gothic tympanum and a Florentine marble sit on facing pages as equals.

A cobbled slope in Burgos, somewhere in the lanes below the cathedral. Stacked café chairs behind a low fence on the left. A furled umbrella out in the middle distance. One white Mini parked across the frame like it was left there by accident. Flat overcast, no shadows worth the name, and not a single person in a picture that contains perhaps two hundred windows. Painters spent most of European history treating a street as a container for events.

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.