Langue et médiation culturelle. Le cas emblématique du livret de l’exposition Léonard de Vinci au Musée du Louvre

The retrospective Leonardo da Vinci 1452 – 1519 recently held at the Louvre 500 years after Leonardo’s death, was conceived as a “total” event aimed at everyone. This ambition was matched by a very complex discourse and a very intense mediation action. For this occasion the administrators have produced an expographic text in the form of an in-octave booklet. More than merely completing the texts posted on the walls of the museum, the booklet was meant to replace them. This support freed the movements of the public and brought the reader-visitor closer to the text, thus making the mediation of the text between the visitor and the artwork even more decisive. It provided a solution to the problems related to the large number of visitors. And it also responded to the double ambition of the exhibition: to lead the visitor on a philologically well-grounded path, and to exalt, to the point of sacralization, the reconstruction of Leonardo’s entire career. My paper offers a linguistic study of the expographic booklet and considers it as a key component of the complex museum discourse from the point of view of cultural mediation, relying on the recent development of linguistic and semiotic studies on museum texts and the specific cultural mediation of art exhibitions. The analysis involves enunciative, lexical and pragmatic phenomena. The aim is to show how this verbal, portable paper support exalts the function of the expographic text putting it at the center of an exhibition project. It also shows how the mediation action was particularly crucial due to the symbolic scope of the event and the material difficulties of the visit. Keywords : Museum expographic texts, enunciation, pragmatics, discourse analysis, evaluative discourse