🔗 Share this article

Entering the planet's most popular museum in the middle of the day, taking eight pieces of priceless Napoleonic jewellery and vanishing into the city traffic on simple scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and ensuing Hollywood film treatments.

Experts who study trends in international art crime, however, see Sunday morning’s heist at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the most recent in a string of smash-and-grab thefts focused more on the material value of precious stones or metals than the artifacts’ significance, continuing a pattern that has emerged over the last ten years in Europe, Britain 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 expensive jewellery are entering a globally renowned museum rather than a luxury jewelry store,” said an expert in art recovery. “The answer is simple: it’s because these days a high-end boutique is more secure.”

A spate of aggressive retail store thefts indicate that many stores have strengthened their protection in the past few years, with security personnel on their locations and wares no longer kept on display overnight. Museums, on the other hand, look more exposed, in part because of the inherent reason of being public-facing institutions in historic buildings, and also the current economic climate in many developed nations.

“After the pandemic, authorities across the globe have cut back on law enforcement and the arts funding,” noted Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it demonstrates how at risk our institutions have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The theft of the items – featuring jewelry pieces made up of eight sapphires and 631 diamonds, the tiara of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive crown once owned by a royal that the thieves dropped by the street on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the historical theft of the famous painting from the same museum, performed by the worker the thief.

Better points of reference may be the 2019 theft of jewellery from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over millions, the taking of a multi-million pound valuable object from Blenheim Palace the that year, the 2017 heist of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a series of robberies of sports memorabilia from US mining museums.

“There’s a simple pattern here,” explained Marinello. “Break in, take items, and dismantle them as rapidly as possible.”

If the artefacts were to stay whole, experts say, the thieves would find it hard to find a buyer. “It's impossible to sell something as recognizable as the Louvre’s jewels on the legal marketplace”, commented an art crime researcher of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They are too well-known, especially given the Ministry of Culture has published photos of the pieces. Even a individual buyer or an auction house would want to see paperwork confirming proper ownership before handling such striking pieces.”

In the previous years, institutions were often hesitant to go public about the disappearance of well-known works of art and would remain quiet out of shame. These days, as cultural robberies are more widely publicised, the keeping and selling of stolen art is dangerous for any lawbreaker.

“Taking a famous painting, it has to remain intact or it becomes valueless, and you have to conceive of a plan to keep it in hiding, maybe by passing it around dangerous individuals,” said Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the risk of an partner telling the police to cash in a ransom.”

For similar reasons, an investigator said it was vanishingly unlikely that the theft had been commissioned. “Commissioned theft is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “No one would handle these items. It's global news and in all the newspapers. If you buy this, if you are apprehended, you go to jail. You can't display it to your friends, you cannot leave it to your children.”

Altering taken items by melting down or reshaping does reduce the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with significant danger because contemporary cutting techniques give gems a bigger and lighter surface area, and older-style stones would either attract notice or reduce value for a concealment.

Importantly, however, dismantling or re-cutting eliminates the evidence of the theft. “I suspect that the Louvre thieves will try to bring the items to locations with gem knowledge like Israel, another nation or even as close as a city, and find someone to cut out the gems,” suggested Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already brought up concerns about protective steps at the museum, with a leaked state auditor report expected to be released soon criticising “significant” and “persistent” slow progress in updating systems and observing that surveillance were lacking in many rooms. But specialists say displaying precious items in older structures with a constant flow of guests comes with risks that are impossible to remove entirely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to secure,” explained an art crime professor. “Many of them have large accessible windows that allows for criminals to get away, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you can’t fit them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The most solid protective measures for structures should be designed “as a stronghold”, noted Peter Stürmann. “There should be several layers to repel intruders.”

Modern buildings are equipped with state-of-the-art surveillance systems or in-built seismic detectors that alert about a smashed window in real time, but old museums may be hesitant to uglify their appearance. Detection devices can be hard to install to decorated surfaces. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be disabled during the day as hordes of visitors walk through a museum.

The timing of the Louvre raid, which occurred between 9.30am and 9.40am in Paris, was common of modern robberies, Stürmann said. “It's logical why robberies tend to happen at either opening or closing times. It’s often when security rotate and before the museum is full of visitors who actually act as extra protection.”

Advances in technology may have introduced new devices that can raise the alarm more quickly and effectively, but it has also provided thieves new methods with which to bypass protections. In Paris, the thieves reached the museum’s upper level with a vehicle-mounted ladder and breached a glass pane with a electric tool.

Elaine Sciolino said the conversation in France about the 232-year-old structure had mostly focused on visitor management in the past decade, and less on security.

The museum has an in-house brigade of about fifty permanent emergency personnel, but their purpose is mostly to safeguard the collection from blazes and flooding. “There is no rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the safety of the Louvre all depends on government support and funding, and at present France lacks sufficient resources.”