Paris (AFP)

No less than 162 works by Leonardo da Vinci are on display this Thursday at the Louvre Museum: the largest retrospective ever organized for the genius of the Renaissance, which died 500 years ago, the Paris exhibition promises to attract visitors from around the world.

To regulate the expected affluence, the exhibition, which will last until February 24, can only be accessed by reservation. Some 260,000 tickets have already been booked.

After the Tutankhamen exhibition at La Villette (1.42 million visitors in total), the Léonard expo promises to be the other blockbuster of the year in France.

The retrospective offers the unique opportunity to admire ten paintings by the master of the Renaissance (eleven taking into account the Mona Lisa, jewel of the collections of the Louvre) while only twenty paintings are attributed by the 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 Room of the museum but will be present via a virtual reality experience of seven minutes proposed at the end of the course. Visitors will need to register for this 3D immersion at the entrance of the exhibition.

The famous "Salvator Mundi", missing since its purchase for a dizzying sum a year and a half ago ($ 450 million, a record), will however not be the appointment, except huge surprise last minute. Officially, it was acquired to complete the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection.

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.

At the end of negotiations between countries and between museums, Rome has agreed to lend several drawings including the famous "Man of Vitruvius" fragile work kept at the Academy Gallery in Venice who arrived late and will remain only two months at the Louvre.

Through a journey in four stages, the exhibition offers to discover drawings, manuscripts, paintings, works of his contemporaries as well as infrared reflectography to admire the pictorial technique of the Italian master. It is not, however, an exhibition on the inventor Leonardo and scholar.

© 2019 AFP