Paris Louvre tickets for da Vinci show now on sale

The exhibition will commemorate 500 years since the death of the Tuscan polymath and Renaissance painter, and is scheduled to begin on October 24.

No tickets to the museum will be available to buy at the door, and must be purchased in advance. The tickets will include general entry to the museum, and the temporary da Vinci show.

Reservations by hour of arrival at the museum can be made at www.ticketlouvre.fr, at the 165 Fnac stores across the country, and in large supermarkets in France, including Carrefour and Intermarché.

General entry to the museum (including the show) costs €17 per adult, with concessions available.

This is the first time that ticket sales have been open so early for the Louvre.

The much-anticipated show will bring together more than 120 works by da Vinci, including paintings, drawings, manuscripts, sculptures, and objects from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions.

These include the Institut de France, the British Royal Collection, the British Museum and the British National Gallery; the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and the Pinacoteca at the Vatican Museums in Rome.

This is not the first time that the Louvre has introduced advance, time-specific entry tickets. In 2018, it did the same ahead of an exhibition of the work of Dutch painter Vermeer.

However, this is the first time that bookings have been opened four months early, which the museum has said is a means of crowd-control, to ensure that visitors can actually see the exhibits inside.

In a statement, the museum said: “Due to the amount of people expected, the exhibition will be available only through reservation for specific times, to offer a more comfortable visit. This will apply to all visitors, including those with free access to the museum.”

The Paris Louvre museum is the most-visited in the world, with 10.2 million visits last year.

It already exhibits one of Leonardo da Vinci’s most-famous paintings, the Mona Lisa - which is known in French as La Joconde - along with four other works, and 22 drawings.