Late Night Leonardo: The Louvre Announces Free All-Nighters for the Final Days of Its Blockbuster Show

If you missed your chance to
snap up one of the coveted tickets to the Louvre’s Leonardo da
Vinci exhibition, now is the time to start caffeinating.

The Paris museum will be open
all night long for the final three days of the exhibition. Bookings
open tomorrow, February 11 to secure a slot during the night of
Friday February 21 through Sunday February 23, when visitors will
be able to see the show between 9 p.m. and 8:30 a.m. Time slots
during regular opening hours have long been sold out.

The museum’s director, Jean-Luc
Martinez, announced the novel openings in the French
paper Le Journal du
dimanche. “For
visitors, this is a unique opportunity to view or review so many
works gathered from this genius of the Renaissance in such a
special atmosphere,” Martinez said. 

Not only will visitors be able
to experience Leonardo like never before, they will be able to see
the special exhibition free of charge. Close to 30,000 tickets are up for grabs for
the once-in-a-lifetime deal. Those hoping to get a slot will have to make a
reservation for a timed entry online. Bookings open on Tuesday at
noon (that’s 6 a.m. EST) via the museum’s
website. (Hopefully
they’ve sorted out the kinks in the software that meant the site
crashed first time around due to the unprecedented demand to
land a timed slot
to view the historic exhibition.)

The Louvre has never opened to
the public all night before (although for one lucky
couple it became an Airbnb for a
night). Some 40 museum
workers have volunteered to work overtime to make the all-nighter
possible.

Martinez explained that the
free-of-charge initiative is “a way of telling everyone that the
museum is for all.” He emphasized that more than 40 percent of the
museum’s 10 million annual visitors access the museum for
free. 

“This event is the Louvre’s way of thanking the public for their
interest in the exhibition,” the museum says in a press statement.
“If you have not yet managed to see it, or if you loved it so much
that you would like to come again, now is the final chance.”

The Louvre show, which marks the
500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, is the largest-ever
exhibition of the Italian master’s work. It brings together some 160 works, including nine paintings and 80
drawings by Leonardo, as well as works by his master, Andrea del Verrocchio, and his two main
disciples, Marco d’Oggiono and Giovanni Antonio
Boltraffio.

A sleepless night with Leonardo
could mirror the conditions under which the Renaissance genius is
believed to have created his masterworks. One of the many theories about the artist is
that he practiced a polyphasic sleep cycle, napping for just 15
minutes every four hours in lieu of a full night’s
sleep.

Sleep researcher Claudio Stampi
cites the story in his 1992 book Why We Nap. In the
Atlantic Codex, which is on loan to the exhibition from
Milan’s Biblioteca Ambrosiana,
Leonardo writes: “O
sleepers! What a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles
death.”

Artnet News reached out to exhibition’s
co-curator Louis Frank, who recently read the entire Leonardo
bibliography, to ask whether he had come across anything to support
the theory about Leonardo’s unusual sleeping habits, but the
curator did not get back by press time.

The post Late Night Leonardo: The Louvre Announces Free
All-Nighters for the Final Days of Its Blockbuster Show
appeared first on artnet News.