Beyoncé and Jay-Z took their love story to the Louvre Museum in the video for Apeshit, from their surprise joint album Everything Is Love, dropped over the weekend in the middle of their On the Run II tour. The striking video injects Blackness into the white, European and colonial space of the Parisian museum. Some of the Louvre’s most famous works make appearances, including Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), The Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 B.C.), Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana (1563) and Ary Scheffer’s Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta Appraised by Dante and Virgil (1835), zooming in on Francesca’s tears. Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress (1800), one of the few black subjects in the museum’s presentation of European art, gets a close-up. Among the most memorable clips is Beyoncé leading a lineup of black female dancers in front of David’s The Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon and the Coronation of Empress Joséphine on December 2, 1804 (1805-07). The video also recalls a viral 2014 Instagram post of the pair in front of the Mona Lisa, in which Beyoncé mimics the sitter’s enigmatic smile. The couple turns towards the painting at the end of Apeshit—do they have their sights set on (or are they arriving at) that level of fame?
