Museums in Paris: Musée du Louvre #2

This year, 2019, is the 500th anniversary of the death Leonardo da Vinci, who spent the last three years of his life in Amboise, France in the service of King Francis I.  

To honor da Vinci, the Louvre museum is hosting a temporary exhibition of some of da Vinci's paintings and drawings.  

We visited the much-touted exhibition recently and enjoyed seeing many of his works collected in one place.  A few of the paintings come from the Louvre's permanent collection/  So, they will look familiar since we included photos of them in earlier blog posts.  

To get started, here is a short biography of da Vinci.  

Next, below is a photographic tour of the collection.  Several of the original works are by da Vinci.  However, other original works are by his talented students or contemporaries.  Plus, other works are merely infrared images of Da Vinci paintings that were not in exhibition.  

What did Leonardo da Vinci look like?  Below is a well-known portrait of da Vinci near the end of his life, by Franceso Melzi.

Portrait de Léonard de Vinci, attributed to Francesco Melzi (about 1515-1518) (Sanguine)

An early teacher of da Vinci was Florentine sculptor and painter Andrea del Verrochio.  Verrochio first schooled da Vinci in drawing, with a focus on depicting light, shadow and depth.  That skill served da Vinci well in his paintings.   Below is one of Verrochio's sculptures that da Vinci might have studied.  

We enjoyed seeing for the first time some original da Vinci paintings and drawings that were borrowed by the Louvre for inclusion in the temporary exhibition, like the four works below.

 

In addition to original works, the exhibition included some excellent copies of da Vinci paintings, like The Last Supper and the two following paintings.  

 

(da Vinci might have created the underdrawing of the painting above)

Below are some original works that we enjoyed viewing.

 

Below is an infrared image of da Vinci's Salvator Mundi (about 1500), which sold at auction in 2018 for major ducats.  The buyer is believed to be the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

Thanks for visiting the da Vinci exhibition with us.

P.S.  The exhibition did not include da Vinci's well-known Mona Lisa.  To see that painting, you have to wait in another very long line.  Because 25-30,000 visitors come every day to the Louvre expressly to see the Mona Lisa, isolating that painting in a limited-entry exhibition could have provoked many complaints. Fortunately, we already saw the Mona Lisa and are including her here.  

La Joconde (aka The Mona Lisa) by Leonardo da Vinci (1503)