🔗 Share this article

Entering the planet's most popular art institution in broad daylight, grabbing eight items of invaluable historical gems and disappearing into the city traffic on humble scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, executed for international notoriety and subsequent movie adaptations.

Experts who study patterns in international art crime, however, see Sunday morning’s robbery at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the latest in a string of quick-hit thefts focused more on the monetary worth of valuable gems or metals than the artifacts’ significance, continuing a trend that has emerged over the last ten years in Germany, the UK and the US. The location, they propose, would have been of lesser importance to the criminals.

“One might wonder why thieves who want to steal valuable jewellery are entering a world-famous museum rather than a Cartier store,” said an expert in art recovery. “It's straightforward: it’s because these days a Cartier store is more secure.”

A spate of aggressive jewellery shop thefts mean that many stores have strengthened their security in the past few years, with armed guards on their premises and merchandise no longer kept on display overnight. Cultural institutions, meanwhile, look vulnerable, partly because of the in-built reason of being accessible institutions in historic buildings, and partly the current economic climate in many western countries.

“Since Covid, authorities across the world have cut back on police and the arts funding,” noted Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it shows how vulnerable our institutions have become. This is a horrible time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the objects – including jewelry pieces made up of precious stones and hundreds of gems, the tiara of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive diadem once owned by Napoleon III’s wife that the robbers dropped by the roadside on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the historical theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum, carried out by the worker the thief.

More relevant points of reference may be the recent theft of jewellery from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over millions, the theft of a multi-million pound valuable object from a UK landmark the that year, the 2017 robbery of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a series of thefts of collector items from US mining museums.

“It's a clear trend here,” explained Marinello. “Break in, take items, and dismantle them as rapidly as possible.”

If the items were to stay whole, experts say, the thieves would struggle to find a buyer. “There’s no way to trade something as immediately identifiable as the Louvre’s jewels on the licit market”, said Lynda Albertson of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They would be immediately recognised, particularly given the Ministry of Culture has published photos of the items. Even a private collector or an sales venue would want to see documentation confirming proper ownership before touching such striking pieces.”

In the previous years, museums were often reluctant to go public about the loss of famous art pieces and would remain quiet out of shame. Now, as cultural robberies are more reported on, the storage and selling of stolen art is risky business for any lawbreaker.

“Taking a famous painting, it has to stay complete or it becomes valueless, and you have to devise a scheme to keep it in hiding, perhaps by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the danger of an partner telling the police to collect a ransom.”

For similar reasons, an art detective said it was highly improbable that the theft had been ordered. “Commissioned theft is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It's global news and in all the newspapers. If you buy this, if you get caught, you go to jail. You cannot show it to your acquaintances, you cannot bequeath it to your children.”

Altering taken items by dismantling or reshaping does lower the worth. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with considerable risk because modern methods give stones a larger and brighter surface area, and older-style stones would either draw unwanted attention or barter the price down for a coverup.

Importantly, however, melting down or re-cutting removes the proof of the crime. “I suspect that the robbers will try to bring the stolen goods to places with diamond expertise like Israel, India or even as nearby as a city, and find someone to remove the gems,” suggested Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already raised questions about protective steps at the institution, with a leaked official review expected to be published soon pointing out “significant” and “persistent” slow progress in modernizing systems and observing that surveillance were lacking in many rooms. But security experts say showing precious items in historic buildings with a steady stream of visitors comes with risks that are impossible to remove entirely.

“Older structures are much harder to protect,” said an art crime professor. “Many of them have nice big street-facing windows that allows for thieves to get away, and there may be building protection statutes in place that mean you are unable to install them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The most solid protective measures for buildings should be conceptualised “like a fortress”, said a security advisor. “It should include several layers to deter attackers.”

Contemporary structures are equipped with advanced surveillance systems or integrated vibration sensors that alert about a smashed window in real time, but old museums may be reluctant to alter their exteriors. Detection devices can be hard to install to decorated surfaces. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be turned off during the day as hordes of visitors stomp through a museum.

The timing of the Louvre raid, which occurred between morning hours local time, was typical of recent thefts, Stürmann said. “It's logical why thefts tend to happen at either opening or closing times. Frequently when security rotate and before the museum is crowded who actually act as extra protection.”

Technological progress may have thrown up new devices that can notify more quickly and effectively, but it has also given thieves new methods with which to circumvent security measures. In the city, the thieves accessed the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and breached a window with a electric tool.

Elaine Sciolino said the conversation in the country about the historic building had mostly focused on crowd control in recent years, and not as much on security.

The museum has an in-house team of about fifty permanent emergency personnel, but their purpose is mainly to protect the collection from blazes and water damage. “There is no rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the security of the Louvre all comes down to government support and money, and at present France lacks sufficient resources.”