PARIS — 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 as making art, and who ignored (and missed) commission deadlines almost till the day he died.

That day was May 2, 1519. And his death, at 67, happened in France, where he passed his last years as court artist to King Francis I . Leonardo’s residency there helps explain why so large a percentage of his surviving works — a total of only about 15 to 20 paintings are generally attributed to his hand — ended up in Louvre’s collection, which in turn helps explain why the quincentenary tribute is happening in France and not in Italy, his native land.