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LOUVRE

Louvre opens bookings for blockbuster Da Vinci show

The Louvre museum in Paris will on Tuesday open bookings for a blockbuster exhibition in October of most of Leonardo da Vinci's paintings to mark the quincentennial of the Renaissance master's death.

Louvre opens bookings for blockbuster Da Vinci show
Illustration photo: AFP
Tickets to the show opening on October 24 will not be available at the box office, but only on the website www.ticketlouvre.fr and in major stores.
 
Adults will pay 17 euros to access the exhibition as well as the museum's permanent collections, with concessions also available. 
   
“Because of the expected crowds, the exhibition will be accessible only by time slot as a way of ensuring the most comfortable visit,” the museum said in a statement on Monday.
   
“This applies to all visitors, including those with free access to the museum,” it said.
   
The Louvre possesses Leonardo's most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, along with four others, as well as 22 drawings.
 
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Photo: AFP
   
The Mona Lisa was among three of Leonardo's favourite paintings, the others being the Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, and Saint John the Baptist, which he brought with him to France where he died 500 years ago on May 2.
   
The show will include nearly 120 more works — paintings, drawings, manuscripts, sculptures and other items — loaned by some of the most prestigious European and American institutions such as Britain's Royal Collection, the British Museum, London's National Gallery, the Pinacoteca at the Vatican, New York's Metropolitan Museum and the Institut de France.
 
In April it was revealed that the Salavtor Mundi, a work that in recent months has been the intense focus of scrutiny by the media and da Vinci specialists, may not be on show.   
 
Negotiations for loans from Italy are still under way after hitting a snag, with the right-wing government in Rome baulking at lending many of Italy's Leonardos — including the iconic Vitruvian Man drawing — to the Louvre under an agreement reached with the previous government.
   
The two sides have yet to agree on a definitive list.
 
The French side has agreed to lend paintings by Raphael to Rome next year for that Renaissance master's quincentennial.
   
Some 10.2 million people visited the Louvre last year.
 

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TOURISM

New guide to Paris museums – showing only the nudes

There are lots of guides to the visual splendours of Paris' museums and art galleries - but for those with a short attention span comes a new one, showing only nude or erotic artworks.

New guide to Paris museums - showing only the nudes
Find your way straight to the most erotic works in Paris galleries. Photo: Guiseppe Cacace/AFP

The online guides to the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay museums are produced by the porn website Pornhub and provide a list of the best erotic artworks in each museum, plus directions of how to get there – so you don’t need to waste your time looking at paintings of people in clothes.

The Classic Nudes series has been ruffling some feathers since it was posted online earlier in July, with the Uffizi museum in Florence threatening to sue. Bosses at the Louvre have said only that they are ‘dismayed’, while the Musée d’Orsay has remained silent on the subject.

The guide for the Musée d’Orsay lists 11 erotic artworks, together with a tongue-in-cheek commentary, and a location for each piece within the museum.

The Sleep by Gustave Courbet. Photo by FRANCOIS GUILLOT / AFP

Among the works featured are;

  • Le déjeuner sur l’herbe by Edouard Manet (1863) – which features a group having a picnic in which the woman has lost her clothes (the men remain fully dressed in three-piece suits and ties).
  • Un combat des coqs by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1846) – a nude couple watching a cock fight (that’s cockerels fighting, just to be clear).
  • L’origine du monde by Gustave Courbet (1866) – more than 150 years after it was first painted, the intimate close-up of female genitalia is still making waves. In 2019 Facebook had to pay damages to a French teacher whose account was closed when he posted a picture of the famous artwork.

The guide for the Louvre includes:

Nude young Man by Hippolyte Flandrin. Photo by KENZO TRIBOUILLARD / AFP
  • Portrait of Madeleine by Marie Guillemine Benoist (1800) – groundbreaking in several senses, this painting is one of the few on the list by a woman, and shows a topless black woman, painted just six years after the abolition of slavery in France’s colonies. 
  • Diane sortant du bain by François Boucher (1742) – one of many paintings on the list showing women having a bath, this features the Greek goddess Diana and her favourite nymph apparently surprised by the artist in the process of drying off after a bath. 
  • Le Jeune homme nu by Hippolyte Flandrin (1835) – most of the flesh shown in both the galleries is female (because that’s the patriarchy for you) but here we have a more rare male nude, a study of a young man sitting and looking rather sad and pensive.

As is hopefully clear, the Pornhub guides are explicit in nature and not suitable for children.

Both museums, however, form a great day out for all the family and contain a lot of fully-clothed artwork too. At present both are operating reduced visitor numbers due to health rules, so advance booking to recommended.

IN DETAIL: When do France’s top tourist sites reopen?

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