This grand scheme has attracted criticism in France as a low-brow and cynical example of curating by numbers. There are, however, other problems with the concept, not least that to make the whole thing worthwhile one needs to take Picasso at his own estimation. While he never doubted that he deserved his place at art's top table, indeed that he should be at its head, many an exasperated visitor, after struggling through the crowds, will question the seating plan.

The curators have been unable to draw a distinction between those Old Master paintings - Velázquez's Las Meninas, for example - that Picasso systematically explored and genuinely transformed and other works where there is simply a superficial connection. Take the last room of the exhibition, the big finish. It houses some of the greatest nudes in the history of art - Manet's Olympia, Titian's Venus and Cupid with an Organist, Rembrandt's Hendricke Stoffels Bathing, Goya's Naked Maja, an Ingres Odalisque and also a clutch of nine Picassos that supposedly sprang from them. There is, however, little direct connection; Picasso's women are not versions or even descendants of the others and thus no point is made. The room is a collection of fabulous masterpieces (rendering, incidentally, Goya's Clothed Maja meaningless back on its own in the Prado) but it says no more than: "Great artists painted nudes and so did Picasso."

This slapdash thinking does Picasso no favours. It is not his pictures over which most viewers will linger but those he emulated, and he emerges diminished from these all-too-random comparisons. The great paintings here are by others' hands. It seems you can't always judge a man by the company he keeps.