Denon Wing

The Denon Wing is the most celebrated of the Louvre Museum's three principal sections, a vast horseshoe-shaped edifice that stretches farther than three Eiffel Towers laid end to end. It is within this wing that the novel's central drama unfolds, beginning with the murder of curator Jacques Saunière and culminating in the revelation of the Holy Grail's final resting place beneath the museum's inverted pyramid. The wing's name, derived from the French statesman Dominique Vivant Denon, belies its function as the epicenter of the novel's symbological and historical mysteries, a space where art, architecture, and secret history converge.

Architecture and Layout

The Denon Wing is dominated by the Grand Gallery, a seemingly endless corridor that houses the Louvre's most valuable Italian masterpieces. The gallery's famous parquet floor, laid in a dazzling geometric design of diagonal oak slats, creates an ephemeral optical illusion that gives visitors the sense of floating through the space. At the far end of this corridor lies the Salle des Etats, a dead-end chamber that is the sole room off the middle of the Grand Gallery and the home of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. The wing's entrance is marked by the controversial glass pyramid designed by I. M. Pei, a seventy-one-foot-tall transparent structure that serves as the museum's main entrance and is itself a symbol of the fusion of ancient and modern. The pyramid, constructed of exactly 666 panes of glass at the explicit demand of President François Mitterrand, is a detail that conspiracy buffs have long linked to the number of Satan, though Langdon chooses not to mention this to Captain Bezu Fache.

The Murder Scene

The Denon Wing is the site of Jacques Saunière's death. After being shot by Silas, the curator staggers into the Grand Gallery, pulls a Caravaggio from the wall to activate the security gate, and then arranges his own body in the shape of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, drawing a pentacle on his abdomen with his own blood. The security gate separates Saunière from his attacker, who fires through the bars, leaving the curator to die alone. The body is discovered by the police, and the scene becomes the focal point of the investigation. The curator's final message, written in black-light ink on the parquet floor, includes a scrambled Fibonacci sequence, the phrases "O, Draconian devil!" and "Oh, lame saint!" and the postscript "P.S. Find Robert Langdon." This message, which Langdon later deciphers as an anagram for "Leonardo da Vinci! The Mona Lisa!" and a command to find Sophie Neveu, sets the entire plot in motion.

The Escape

The Denon Wing is also the setting for Langdon and Sophie's escape from the Louvre. After Sophie reveals that Fache is recording their conversation and that Langdon is the prime suspect, she devises a plan to fake his suicide by throwing a bar of soap containing the GPS tracking dot out of the men's room window onto a passing truck. The two then hide in the shadows of the Grand Gallery as Fache rushes past them to investigate the shattered window. They flee through an emergency stairwell, with Sophie retrieving a gold key from behind Leonardo da Vinci's Madonna of the Rocks in the Salle des Etats. The key, embossed with the Priory of Sion's seal, leads them to the Depository Bank of Zurich and ultimately to the cryptex that contains the map to the Holy Grail.

The Final Revelation

In the novel's epilogue, Robert Langdon returns to the Louvre and stands beneath the inverted pyramid, La Pyramide Inversée, which hangs from the ceiling of the subterranean entresol. He realizes that the blade and chalice guarding the Grail are represented by the inverted pyramid (the chalice) and the miniature pyramid below it (the blade), and that the Grail itself lies beneath the starry skies, a reference to the star-filled night visible through the glass. The Denon Wing, with its vast collection of masterpieces, is thus revealed as the final resting place of the Holy Grail, a secret that has been hidden in plain sight for centuries.