REPORTAGE
The great Leonard has the honors of the Louvre, from Thursday. The museum dedicates an exceptional retrospective to Leonardo da Vinci for four months. This extraordinary exhibition is the culmination of ten years of work, research, sorting, and translations to put back the documentation available on the Florentine master, and dispel fantasies and rumors.
Art historians had a lot of writings on Leonardo da Vinci with, as surprising as it may seem, a lot of distorted information. It was therefore necessary to check everything and correct. His paintings were also passed to infra-red, to reveal his preparatory drawings and his technique of work. Visitors will discover this meticulous research work over the course of the exhibition.
To bring paintings from all over the world
But the most complicated thing was again to bring all these works to Paris. Imagine the heads of the various museums when asked to travel some of their most treasured treasures. It took five years to convince all, five long years to negotiate every detail of transportation, installation, security measures. Nothing was simple, as for example for his most famous drawing, The Vitruvian Man , which will be exposed only two months because of its fragility.
In total, the exhibition will gather ten paintings on the fortnight that Leonardo da Vinci painted during his lifetime, including the five that already has the Louvre. "This is the first time that we can explain the whole life of Leonardo da Vinci, from his youth until his death, and show that most of his life was a quest for painting, art considered superior to all others ", explains to Europe 1 Vincent Delieuvin, one of the two curators of the exhibition.
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Loans from Bill Gates and the Queen of England
Among the paintings on display will be La Madonne Benois, from the Hermitage in Saint-Petersburg, a portrait of the Virgin, as a young mother playing with her child. There are also 88 drawings, with outstanding loans: several sketches of the astronomy notebook, entrusted by Bill Gates, or drawings from Great Britain. "The Conservatives of the Queen of England have been extremely generous, we have been able to choose the drawings we wanted, the queen has lent 24 drawings, it is considerable, nobody can lend so much," greets Vincent Delieuvin.
A historic affluence
Battalion vigilantes, alarms and state-of-the-art cameras have been deployed for works whose price is invaluable. But the Louvre refused to communicate on the details of the measures, especially as the museum expects a record crowd: 600,000 visitors over four months, or 7,000 people per day. This is the maximum capacity for a temporary exhibition. Reservations are therefore mandatory: the Louvre has already sold some 220,000 tickets.