"Look at the number of children present! The museum is one of the rare places where we meet so many generations and different origins. Only Leonardo and the Louvre can do that, ”rejoiced Jean-Luc Martinez, president and director of the Louvre last week. 20 Minutes had met him on Friday, during one of the last nights organized to discover the exhibition dedicated to Leonardo da Vinci.
The event definitively closed on Monday evening. On Tuesday, at countdown time, the Paris museum revealed that the exhibition had welcomed 1,071,840 visitors in 104 days, an average of 9,783 daily visitors. This is "an absolute record" for the Louvre, whose best previous performance was the retrospective dedicated to Eugène Delacroix - who had gathered 540,000 curious people in 2018.
“It is wonderful that 500 years after his death, an artist of the Italian Renaissance continues to fascinate the general public so much. Today, I have two reasons for pride: to have succeeded in bringing together the greatest number of Leonardo's works and in welcoming so many and so different audiences. It was the scientific excellence and the quality of the reception of the Louvre that were so acclaimed, "said Jean-Luc Martinez in a press release.
The exhibition offered the opportunity to admire ten paintings by the Renaissance master - eleven including the Mona Lisa - while only around twenty paintings are attributed by specialists to Vinci.
386,000 people visited the exhibition for free
The exhibition brought together, in addition to these paintings, some 150 works (drawings, manuscripts, sculptures, works of art) by Leonardo da Vinci and his relatives or students.
“This exceptional figure, for an exhibition open for four months, can be explained by the setting up of 46 additional nocturnes (175,000 visitors) as well as by the last addition of the last three free nights - a first in the history of museum - which made it possible to extend the hours so that the widest possible audience could visit the exhibition. Among these visitors, 386,000 people benefited from free admission, or 36% of them, ”said the museum.
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At the Louvre, visitors savor the nocturnes of the Vinci expo
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