The building on the corner does not look like a museum. It looks like what it was, a merchant’s house from the seventeenth century, cream render going grey at the base, a wide gable with brown timber under the eaves, shutters that still work. You come over Pont Marengo from the other side of town, you notice the red banner, and without the banner you would keep walking. That is the Musée Basque et de l’histoire de Bayonne.

I took this on 8 May 2014, at about twenty to two in the afternoon. It is the large studio in the Rubens House in Antwerp, the room where Rubens and his assistants turned out the enormous canvases that went to Madrid and Paris and London. I had a very wide lens on the camera that day, which is why the ceiling looks like it belongs to a cathedral. It doesn’t.

Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin, arrived as British Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in 1799 and left, between 1801 and 1812, with approximately half the surviving sculptural decoration of the Parthenon. This is the basic fact around which everything else — the legal argument, the cultural argument, the moral argument, the counter-argument, and the occasional productive silence — has been organized for the better part of two centuries.