【Secret Confessions (2025) Spongkey Episode 44】

The Secret Confessions (2025) Spongkey Episode 44Carters have conducted their own art history lesson, but this is not your conventional class.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z unleashed their new track "Apeshit" on Sunday, the lead single from their joint nine-track album Love Is Everything, which dropped Saturday on Tidal.

Of course, it wouldn't be a landmark single release from the Carters without a highly extra video to match, and "Apeshit" is no exception, directed by Ricky Saiz.

Set in the iconic Louvre museum in Paris, the video sees Beyoncé and Jay-Z, among a group of dancers, subvert some of the most famous (primarily white and western) artworks on the entire planet. Some lass called "Mona Lisa" springs to mind.

Even if you haven't visited, you'll likely know of the glass pyramid (think Dan Brown's famous books).

Where Ocean's 8really did a terrible job of shooting the Met collection (seriously, that film made one of the world's most incredible collections of artwork look like a poor library stamp collection), the "Apeshit" video is a complete and utter caress of the Louvre's masterpieces.

Despite appearances, the video is not a wild fan video dedicated to the museum, with many of the works imitated and reinterpreted with modern notions of race and gender, alongside motherhood, sex, humanity and taking a knee.

So, what are we looking at here?

The Winged Victory of Samothrace (C. 190 BC)

Perched above a staircase named just for it, the Winged Victory of Samothrace is the Louvre's triumphant classical favourite — and anyone who's studied art history will know it as one of the most bangin' examples of wet drapery in the Hellenistic age.

According to the Louvre, the winged goddess of Victory is thought to have been an offering given to Rhodes following a naval victory in the early second century BC, and was found in the south-western Cyclades. But it's never looked this modern.

One of the cornerstones of the Louvre, this statue is by far the star work of the video. In some scenes, a dozen or so stunning dancers lie or writhe in flesh-coloured dancewear on the staircase, and Beyoncé spends quite a few crawling moments during the video being overwhelmingly draped in fabric at the foot of Victory.

Mona Lisa (C. 1503 or later)

Heard of it? It's a pretty underground artwork, not protected by bulletproof glass and emblazoned on coffee mugs and copies of The Da Vinci Codeworldwide. Leonard Da Vinci's Mona Lisamakes a prominent appearance in the clip, and can be seen behind an equally unsmiling Bey and Jay. It's a rare moment of peace for the wildly popular mystery woman who receives 6 million visitors a year.

Look. At. The. Parquet. Floors.

Seriously, just seeing this famous room cleared out of tourists is a dream, instead of its usual raging mosh pit of smartphones clamouring for a photo of an art work that wasn't even Leonardo's best (there, I said it.)

Later in the video, you'll also see portions of other artwork on the opposite wall from the Mona Lisa, Paolo Veronese's gargantuan, wine-drenched 1653 work, The Wedding at Cana. Drink up.

The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819)

Théodore Géricault's melancholy 19th century masterpiece looms behind Jay-Z in the video, and is one of the museum's large-scale icons sitting in the same gallery as Eugène Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People. Sigh, you know it. It's... the one on the Coldplay album cover.

Less triumphant than its gallery neighbour, The Raft of the Medusa, according to the Louvre, depicts the hopeless aftermath of an 1816 wreck of a French frigate off the Senegal coast. Without enough lifeboats to go around, the survivors built a raft for 150 people left behind — 10 survived. It's no surprise this brutal, every-man-for-themselves work has featured in a music video in 2018, to be honest.

It's also not the only Géricault in the video, with 1812's The Charging Chasseurdepicting an attacking Napoleonic calvary officer imitated by a performer.

Aphrodite, aka the Venus de Milo (C. 100 BC)

We all know Beyonce is the goddess of love, light and all molecular activity. But others, say, sculptors in the late Hellenistic Period, had their own goddesses to sculpt, including this highly recognisable armless statue thought to represent Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love.

According to the Louvre, the Venus de Milo was discovered on the island of Melos in 1820, so it could also be the sea goddess Amphitrite, who was revered on the island. But who is looking at the immovable statue in this bit? Who?

The Coronation of Napoleon (1806-07)

Yes, Neoclassical master Jacques Louis David could paint one heck of a large-scale coronation portrait, but there is nothingmore satisfying than watching Beyonce and her team of modern queens move in sync in front of The Coronation of Napoleon.

According to the Louvre, David was commissioned to paint this monumental coronation scene by Napoleon I, who was proclaimed emperor in May 1804. But that's not Napoleon being crowned, that's his first wife Empress Joséphine.

It's also not the only David artwork in the video, with glimpses of the bro moment Oath of the Horatii, the (questionably) euphemistically titled The Intervention of the Sabine Women (the Sabine women were either raped or kidnapped or both, depending on what you read), and Portrait of Madame Récamier,an 1800 portrait of the Parisian socialite Juliette Récamier.

The Great Sphinx of Tanis (ca. 2600 B.C.)

One of the largest sphinxes outside of Egypt, according to the Louvre and one royal asset to the video. With the body of a lion and the head of a king, the Great Sphinx of Tanis sits proudly in the Department of Egyptian Antiquities, and could date back to around 2600 B.C. in the Old Kingdom.

Quick honourable mentions:

Portrait d'une négresse (1800)

Left until the last few moments of the video comes Marie-Guillemine Benoist's polarising work Portrait of a Negressfrom 1800. It flashes on the screen for a few seconds, but you can't miss it.

Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta appraised by Dante and Virgil (1835)

What a mouthful of a title, and what a work.Ary Scheffer's 1835 work gets a split second on screen, and depicts a moment from a scene from Dante's Inferno, the first book of The Divine Comedy.

Madonna with the Green Cushion (c. 1600s)

Andrea Solario's 17th century devotional image of the Madonna only gets a forehead clip, but we spied that use of painted chiaroscuro to sculpt white fabric from a mile away (nah, we used Google Goggles, but anyway).

Look, if the Louvre's line gets longer after this video (and it will) visitors will be in for a much lengthier wait than the museum has already become famous for.