The Louvre Pyramid and the 666 Panes Myth
Why is it significant?
There it is, rising out of the fountains like a crystal tent: a pyramid of glass and steel in the middle of a royal palace. Walk around it and watch how the old façades are reflected in it, shifting with the clouds. Today it is on every postcard. Forty years ago, a lot of Parisians wanted it dead.
Key Facts
| Place | The Louvre Pyramid and the 666 Panes Myth |
|---|---|
| Address | Cour Napoléon, Rue de Rivoli, 75001 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.86100, 2.33580 |
| Part of Walk | Glass Roofs and Royal Secrets: From the Louvre to the Covered Passages of Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
There it is, rising out of the fountains like a crystal tent: a pyramid of glass and steel in the middle of a royal palace. Walk around it and watch how the old façades are reflected in it, shifting with the clouds. Today it is on every postcard. Forty years ago, a lot of Parisians wanted it dead.
In 1981 President François Mitterrand launched the Grand Louvre project. The museum was a maze with a tiny entrance, and the Ministry of Finance still occupied a whole wing. Mitterrand chose the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei, without a competition. Pei's answer was to put the entrance underground, and to let the light down into it through a pyramid twenty-one metres high.
The outcry was ferocious. Newspapers called it a gadget, a diamond for a supermarket, an insult to French history. Opponents said it was a tomb in the courtyard of the kings. Pei later remembered angry looks from strangers in the Paris streets. The pyramid opened in 1989, and within a few years the critics had mostly gone quiet... the museum's visitor numbers had exploded.
And now the legend. For years people have whispered that the pyramid has exactly six hundred and sixty-six panes, the number of the Beast. The rumour was helped along by a mistaken figure in early publicity, and then by a certain best-selling thriller. The museum's official count is six hundred and seventy-three: six hundred and three diamonds and seventy triangles. Sorry, conspiracy fans.
One detail almost everyone misses: the equestrian statue of Louis the Fourteenth at the western edge of the courtyard. It is a lead cast of a statue by Bernini that the king disliked so much he had it banished to a corner of Versailles. Pei placed the copy here on purpose, to mark the great axis that runs from the Louvre through the Carrousel arch and the Tuileries all the way to the Arc de Triomphe. Now head north through the palace passage to the Rue de Rivoli, and cross towards the theatre with the columns.