The mirrors
Seventeen arches of mirror face the seventeen windows, made of more than 350 panes. Mirror glass was a costly luxury, and making it in France broke Venice's monopoly.
Media example
Read-only showcaseThe Hall of Mirrors, feature by feature
An interior photograph with its features marked, each comparing the room with its paintings and history.
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The ceiling
Painted under Charles Le Brun: thirty scenes celebrating the first two decades of Louis XIV's personal rule. At the centre, The King rules by Himself, 1661.
The chandeliers
Crystal chandeliers hang the whole length of the gallery. In Louis XIV's day they held candles, and the mirrors doubled every flame.
Statues in the niches
Antique gods and Muses - Venus, Bacchus and Diana among them - stand in the niches, with marble and porphyry busts of eight Roman emperors.
The furniture
The tables and stools are mostly 19th-century. The original furniture was solid silver, and Louis XIV had it melted down in 1689 to pay for a war.
Gilded figures
Gilded statues stand along the gallery, each holding up a candelabrum of crystal.
The Salon of Peace
At the far end, the Salon of Peace; at the other, the Salon of War. The gallery joined the King's apartments to the Queen's.
The light from the garden
Every window looks west over the gardens, and in the afternoon the sun lays their pattern across the parquet.
Where history was signed
The German Empire was proclaimed in this room in 1871. In 1919 the treaty that ended the First World War was signed in the same room - by design.
About this picture
The picture under this example is the gallery, 73 metres long, built between 1678 and 1684. Photograph: Myrabella, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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