Does the Louvre's glass pyramid really have 666 panes?

No. For decades, a rumor has claimed that the glass pyramid at the entrance to the Louvre contains exactly 666 panes of glass, 'the number of the beast'. It even made it into Dan Brown's bestselling novel The Da Vinci Code, whose protagonist claims French president François Mitterrand personally demanded that precise number. According to I. M. Pei's own architectural office, though, Mitterrand never specified a number of panes at all, and the true count, confirmed by the Louvre itself, is 673: 603 rhombus-shaped segments and 70 triangular ones.

The rumor actually dates back to the pyramid's construction in the 1980s, when the official brochure published during construction cited the number 666 twice, and newspapers picked it up from there. One writer on esoteric architecture went so far as to claim the entire structure was 'dedicated to a power described as the Beast in the Book of Revelation'. The myth had unusual staying power for a building that was already controversial for other reasons: from the moment Pei first presented it in 1984, critics attacked its modernist glass-and-metal style as clashing with the Louvre's French Renaissance architecture, mocked it as an out-of-place Egyptian death symbol, and derided it as 'Pharaoh François' Pyramid', a vanity project imposed by the president.

Whatever the arguments over its symbolism, the structure is a serious piece of engineering: 21.6 metres tall, with a 34-metre square base, built entirely from glass and metal, and angled at 51.52 degrees, close to the slope of ancient Egyptian pyramids. It wasn't even Pei's first glass pyramid: he had already built smaller ones at the National Gallery of Art's East Building in Washington in 1978, and he later added more to the IBM Somers Office Complex in New York and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.