De Montebello was a presence in New York and the nation. He came out swinging about the repatriation of looted antiquities, thundering that he needed 'incontrovertible proof' before the Met would return anything to the country of origin. Faced with a wall of evidence, he capitulated and handed back the Euphronios Vase, the prize of all prizes in the Met's Greek vase collection, to the Italians with a show of such magniloquence that it made the Met look like a donor to the State. Possessed of 'the poshest voice in the English language', according to The Wall Street Journal, de Montebello frequently did the commentary for the audio guides to special exhibitions. To hear him say 'Renaissance' in his plummy Anglo-French manner was like hearing the word said properly for the first time. The 'r' rolled for eternity.

So it must have seemed like a bright idea to unite Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford, a well-known London art critic and journalist, to tour some of the world's finest art museums and churches and capture the Great Man's Responses to Art on the wing, as it were. That it all goes horribly wrong should not surprise us. 'Remarks are not literature', as Gertrude Stein famously remarked; and remarks about art are neither art history nor criticism. Banality is the outcome more often than not ('This gallery [in the Prado] is filled with works by Rubens, a cornucopia of joyful, opulent and generous pictures that display his optimism and love of life').

The mise en scène is their undoing. In Florence they visit the Carmine to admire Masaccio's Brancacci Chapel. A paragraph later we are out of there and into Santa Croce. What does de Montebello say about the Masaccios?

above all the corporeal reality of Masaccio's figures. Their sense of weight and presence must have caused amazement at the time. Already they show such key elements of Renaissance art as gravity, seriousness and moral authority.

This is A-stuff in an undergraduate essay. It is not wrong, but it hardly needs one come back from the dead to tell us. What surprises is that nobody seems to be looking hard, scrutinising the frescoes for what is singular and moving. No mention here of the moment of terribilità when Adam, expelled from Paradise, sobs uncontrollably – 'weeping' is too literary. We know that because Masaccio has him convulsed, sucking in all his belly muscles as though he can hardly breathe.

'The astonishing length of his tenure is matched by the brilliance of his reign'

With a Boswell or Eckermann in tow, The Poshest Voice is irresistibly drawn to the oracular. Before Las Meninas, de Montebello turns purple:

the visitor derives much of his thrill, in addition to his apprehension of the sheer beauty of the work, from his firm belief, his total and utter confidence, his absolute trust, that the canvas before him is the one that Diego Velázquez painted; the very one before which the explosive force of his creative genius transformed pigment into a miracle of painterly verisimilitude ... the magic of the original, the authentic, is what the museum can never lose ...

Quite so, quite so, but how does that experience differ from standing in front of The Night Watch or Blue Poles? They too provoke similar 'apprehensions' of 'the explosive force of creative genius'; they too are totally 'authentic'; only Rembrandt or Jackson Pollock could have painted them. If a remark can be readily transferred from one object to another, is it worth making?

'What surprises is that nobody seems to be looking hard, scrutinising the frescoes for what is singular and moving'

We get glimpses of de Montebello's personal taste in the Louvre where he admires Poussin's Inspiration of the Poet: 'before it one feels a sense of tranquillity and serenity, poetry and equipoise ... I am aware of a merger of the cerebral and the emotional that is truly wondrous.'

The longing for an art of repose continues when they visit the Museum Boijmans Van Beunigen in Rotterdam in quest of Pieter Jansz Saenredam and his matchless architectural interiors and empty squares:

There's a whole world here not just of optical representation but of the mind. In the exterior view there are no birds fluttering, and the presence of the dogs and the burghers becomes more an indication of scale to me than of life ... The only sense of transience and movement is in the sky ...

Duccio's Madonna and Child (Metropolitan Museum of Art via Wikimedia Commons)

There are some endearingly human moments, as when de Montebello complains of his bad back or the pair queue up for tickets like ordinary Joes. There is no discussion of any twentieth- or twenty-first-century work, which is disappointing if unsurprising, given de Montebello's antipathy to the modern. But Gayford is a modernist, and it would have been good to see what he might have elicited from his Master even on such soft landings as Picasso and Matisse.

There is one sublime moment when they visit Jean Nouvel's Musée de quai Branly in Paris, which houses the nation's African and Oceanic collections. They recall the interminable winding ramp taking you into the heart of darkness. When you get to the exhibiting areas, the cases are illuminated, but everywhere else is shrouded in sepulchral gloom. The objects are lit to show off their spookiness or their 'modern aestheticism'. They are nearly all products of the cultures of the sun and we are made to see them in darkness. Martin Gayford plaintively remarks: 'It's a labyrinth. So it suggests confusion. We're lost in the forest of a postmodernist architect's imagination.' Philippe de Montebello snaps: 'I hate this place.'