Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon

This guide to the Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon follows the grand staircase inside a former Benedictine convent, climbed by nuns for centuries until the last were expelled in 1792. It traces how the city, in 1883, handed the space to painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, who filled it with nine muses and allegorical figures of the arts rather than any saint. You'll hear how critics mocked the mural as flat and unreadable, and how later painters, including Cezanne, Gauguin and a young Picasso, kept returning to it. Look up at the muses as you climb the same steps the nuns once walked in silence.