Venus de Milo (Aphrodite) (c. 100 BC) Marble (H 202 cm) Melos (the Cyclades islands) Louvre, Paris, France Recorded August 9, 1999

The placement of the Venus de Milo in a relatively small room in the Louvre ensures that the kind of feeding frenzy that surrounds The Mona Lisa elsewhere in the building is somewhat attenuated here. Nonetheless the terrible acoustics of the room ensure that all sound around the statue is resonated to unpleasant proportions. Lacking arms with which to protect her ears, the Venus de Milo becomes Munch's Scream inverted: a silent figure beset by sounds not of her own making and powerless to ward any of it away.