Standing 71 feet high, the steel construction supports 603 diamond-shaped and 70 triangular panes of 21 millimetre thick glass, giving the structure a very elegant and transparent appearance. Completed in 1989, the pyramid allows light into the museum’s reception center and is certainly the most famous of the ‘Grands Projets’.

Also, it has been claimed by some that the glass panes in the Louvre Pyramid number exactly 666, “the number of the beast”, often associated with Satan. Dominique Stezepfandt’s book François Mitterrand, Grand Architecte de l’Univers declares that “the pyramid is dedicated to a power described as the Beast in the Book of Revelation (…) The entire structure is based on the number 6.”The story of the 666 panes originated in the 1980s, when the official brochure published during construction did indeed cite this number (even twice, though a few pages earlier the total number of panes was given as 672 instead). The number 666 was also mentioned in various newspapers. The Louvre museum however states that the finished pyramid contains 673 glass panes (603 rhombi and 70 triangles). A higher figure was obtained by David A. Shugarts, who reports that the pyramid contains 689 pieces of glass. Shugarts obtained the figure from the offices of I. M. Pei (architect of the  Pyramid).