Leonardo, Hand and Mind, shines at the Louvre

To judge by the marketing hullabaloo, the Leonardo da Vinci retrospective that opens here Thursday at the Louvre should be the visual equivalent of a 21-gun salute and a trumpet-and-trombone choir. Blockbuster’s plastered all over it, and rightly so. Timed-ticket sales for its one-stop run are moving right along. But the marvelous show you actually see, honoring the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, is, tonally, some other thing: quieter, slower, better. It’s a succession of major painterly melodies set among ink-drawn pre-echoes and reverbs. It’s a confluence of presences and absences — art that’s there and some that’s not — both equally potent. And it’s a biographical vapor trail of a talent who has been used as a romantic model of what a great artist should be — large-gestured, face-to-the-sunrise — but who largely departed from that ideal, who identified himself above all as a science wonk, who spent as much time writing a