Louvre Abu Dhabi to be first museum in Middle East to show a Leonardo Da Vinci painting

With only 14 months to go before the official opening of Louvre Abu Dhabi, a stellar cast has been assembled for the fourth and final series of the Louvre Abu Dhabi Talking Art Series, which begins at Manarat Al Saadiyat on Wednesday night.

The speakers who will grace the seventh-month-long programme of lectures and events may include some of the world’s most illustrious art historians, a Pritzker Architecture Prize-winner and an Oscar-nominated, Bafta-winning film director; yet all of these are set to be upstaged by the announcement of an unprecedented and much-anticipated visit of a mysterious young lady from Milan.

Art historians disagree about the true identity of the enigmatic woman now known as La Belle Ferronniere, but her status as one of only a handful of undisputed portraits painted by Leonardo da Vinci – and as one of the great masterpieces of the High Renaissance – is beyond doubt.

Leonardo started very few paintings during his lifetime and completed even fewer and, although the number of solely painted works attributed to the master has changed throughout art history, what is certain is that La Belle Ferronniere is one of only five Leonardo paintings in the collection of the Musee du Louvre in Paris.

The portrait, in which a serious-looking young woman dressed in red velvet stares out at the viewer, will form part of the first batch of about 300 works sent on loan from more than a dozen cultural institutions in France to supplement the new permanent collection of Louvre Abu Dhabi when it opens in December next year.

Original article by Nick Leech

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Louvre Abu Dhabi to be first museum in Middle East to show a Leonardo Da Vinci painting