Everything about La Pyramide Invers E totally explained
La Pyramide Inversée (
The Inverted Pyramid) is a
skylight constructed in an underground
shopping mall in front of the
Louvre Museum in
France. It may be thought of as a smaller sibling of the more famous
Louvre Pyramid proper, yet turned upside down: its upturned base is easily overlooked from outside. It is also known for being the fictional resting place of the
Holy Grail in
The Da Vinci Code.
Design
The
pyramid marks the intersection of two main walkways and orients visitors towards the museum entrance. Tensioned against a 30-ton, 13.3-meter square steel
caisson frame, the inverted pyramidal shape in laminated glass points downward towards the floor. The tip of the pyramid is suspended 1.4 meters (a little more than 4.5 feet) above floor level. Individual glass panes in the pyramid, 30 mm thick, are connected by
stainless-steel crosses 381 mm in length. After dark, the structure is illuminated by a
frieze of
spotlights.
Directly below the tip of the downwards-pointing glass pyramid, a small stone pyramid (about one meter/three feet high) is stationed on the floor, as if mirroring the larger structure above: The tips of the two pyramids almost touch.
La Pyramide Inversée was designed by architects
I.M. Pei,
Cobb Freed and Partners, and installed as part of the Phase II government renovation of the Louvre Museum. It was completed in 1993. In 1995, it was a finalist in the
Benedictus Awards, described by the jury as "a remarkable anti-structure … a symbolic use of technology … a piece of sculpture. It was meant as an object but it's an object to transmit light."
La Pyramide Inversée in The Da Vinci Code
The Inverted Pyramid figures prominently on the concluding pages of
Dan Brown's international bestseller
The Da Vinci Code. The author, or rather the protagonist of his novel,
Robert Langdon, reads esoteric
symbolism into the two pyramids: The Inverted Pyramid is perceived as a
Chalice, a feminine symbol, whereas the stone pyramid below is interpreted as a Blade, a masculine symbol: the whole structure could thus express the union of the
genders. Moreover, Brown's protagonist concludes that the tiny stone pyramid is actually only the apex of a larger pyramid (possibly the same size as the inverted pyramid above), embedded in the floor as a secret chamber. This chamber is said to enclose the body of
Mary Magdalene.
At the climax of the movie made from Brown's novel, the camera moves through the entire glass pyramid from above and then dives into the floor below to reveal the supposed hidden chamber under the tiny stone pyramid, containing the
sarcophagus with the remains of Mary Magdalene.
In reality, the stone pyramid sits on top of the floor and doesn't extend below it; indeed it's so designed that it can be removed during maintenance work.
Other esoteric interpretations
Brown wasn't the first writer to offer esoteric interpretations of the Inverted Pyramid. In Raphaël Aurillac's work
Le guide du Paris maçonnique the author declares that the Louvre used to be a Masonic temple. To Aurillac, the various glass pyramids constructed in recent decades include Masonic symbolism. Aurillac sees the downward-pointing pyramid as expressing the Rosicrucian motto V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (
Visita Interiorem Terrae Rectificandoque / Invenies Occultum Lapidem, "Visit the interior of the earth and… you'll find the secret stone"). Another writer on Masonic architecture, Dominique Setzepfandt, sees the two pyramids as suggesting "the compass and square that together form the
Seal of Solomon" (quoted in
Code Da Vinci: L'enquête by Marie-France Etchegoin and Frédéric Lenoir).
According to I. M. Pei's biographer Carter Wiseman, he's interested almost solely in abstract geometrical forms. If so, no deeper symbolic meaning should be sought in the inverted pyramid.
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