Paris (AFP)

180,000 pre-bookings, ten years of work, 160 exceptional works, some lent by the Queen of England and Bill Gates ... The exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci", which opens Thursday at the Louvre, is already announced like superlatives.

The hanging of the finished works, museum teams were able to discover Friday the exhibition organized in the framework of the 500 years of the death of the artist (1452-1519).

Seeing all these works together, "it almost feels like giving life to the workshop of Leonardo da Vinci.We are extremely moved," reacted Vincent Delieuvin, Chief Curator of Heritage, Department of paintings.

"We have to come to be dazzled, we do not come out unscathed," he slipped, while 180,000 tickets have already been purchased for this event accessible only by reservation. A device put in place before the summer to cope with the expected affluence.

This exhibition offers the unique opportunity to admire ten paintings by the master of the Renaissance (eleven taking into account the Mona Lisa) while only twenty paintings are attributed by specialists at Vinci. Among them, "The Saint Anne", "Saint John the Baptist" and the "Madonna Benois", lent by the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.

Victim of its success, the Mona Lisa, the most famous painting of the Louvre which attracts nearly 30,000 visitors per day, will remain in the State Hall of the museum but will be present via an experience in virtual reality proposed at the end of the journey to visitors.

The "Salvator Mundi", missing since its purchase for a dizzying sum a year and a half ago (450 million dollars), it has little chance to be at the rendezvous. Officially, it was acquired to complete the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection.

"The Louvre maintains its loan application so we hope it will be there, if it is not there, we have 162 works, it's already a success, only the Louvre was capable of such a meeting because we already have five original paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, "says the museum.

Setting up such an exhibition required ten years of work and loan requests from all over the world, to the Queen of England who lent 24 drawings, including the British Museum, the Vatican and Italy.

Through a journey in four stages, the exhibition - until February 24, 2020 - offers to discover drawings, manuscripts, paintings, works of his contemporaries as well as infrared reflectography allowing to admire the pictorial technique of the Italian master.

© 2019 AFP