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Entering the world’s most-visited museum in the middle of the day, grabbing eight items of invaluable Napoleonic jewellery and vanishing into Paris traffic on simple scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, carried out for global fame and subsequent Hollywood film treatments.

Experts who study patterns in global cultural theft, however, see the recent heist at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the latest in a string of quick-hit thefts focused more on the material value of precious stones or materials than the artifacts’ significance, continuing a pattern that has appeared over the last decade in Europe, Britain and the US. The location, they propose, would have been of lesser importance to the thieves.

“One might wonder why thieves who want to take expensive 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 better protected.”

A spate of aggressive jewellery shop thefts mean that many outlets have beefed up their protection in the past few years, with security personnel on their premises and wares no longer kept on display overnight. Cultural institutions, meanwhile, look vulnerable, in part because of the in-built reason of being public-facing institutions in older structures, and also the financial situation in many developed nations.

“After the pandemic, authorities across the world have reduced spending on law enforcement and the culture sector,” said Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it shows how vulnerable our institutions have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The theft of the items – featuring necklaces made up of eight sapphires and hundreds of gems, the crown of a historical figure containing nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive diadem once possessed by Napoleon III’s wife that the thieves left by the roadside on their way out – has inevitably drawn comparisons with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum, carried out by the worker the thief.

More relevant points of reference may be the 2019 burglary of valuables from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over €113m, the theft of a multi-million pound gold toilet from Blenheim Palace the that year, the 2017 robbery of a large gold coin from a European museum or even a spate of robberies of collector items from American institutions.

“There’s a simple pattern here,” said Marinello. “Smash, grab, and melt it down as quickly as possible.”

If the items were to remain intact, 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 licit market”, said an art crime researcher of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

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

In the previous years, institutions were often hesitant to announce publicly about the disappearance of well-known art pieces and would stay silent out of embarrassment. These days, as cultural robberies are more reported on, the storage and selling of taken items is dangerous for any lawbreaker.

“Taking a famous painting, it has to stay complete or it becomes valueless, and you have to conceive of a plan to keep it in hiding, maybe by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the risk of an accomplice telling the police to cash in a reward.”

For similar reasons, an art detective said it was highly improbable that the robbery had been ordered. “Stolen to order is something from films,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It's global news and in all the media. If you acquire these, 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 worth. When it comes to gems, it also comes with significant danger because modern methods give gems a larger and brighter surface area, and antique-cut stones would either attract notice or reduce value for a coverup.

Importantly, however, dismantling or re-cutting eliminates the proof of the theft. “My guess is that the Louvre thieves will try to take the stolen goods to locations with gem knowledge like Israel, another nation or even as close as a city, and find someone to cut out the gems,” said Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already raised questions about protective steps at the institution, with a leaked official review expected to be published next month criticising “considerable” and “persistent” delays in updating equipment and observing that security cameras were missing in many rooms. But specialists say displaying valuable objects in older structures with a steady stream of guests comes with dangers that are not possible to eliminate completely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to secure,” explained Erin Thompson. “They often have large accessible windows that allows for criminals to escape, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you can’t fit them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The best security systems for structures should be designed “like a fortress”, noted Peter Stürmann. “There should be several layers to repel attackers.”

Modern buildings are fitted with advanced surveillance systems or in-built seismic detectors that alert about a smashed window in real time, but old museums may be hesitant to alter their appearance. Detection devices can be hard to install to decorated surfaces. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be turned off during the daytime as crowds walk through a museum.

The schedule of the robbery, which took place between morning hours in Paris, was common of modern robberies, Stürmann said. “It's logical why thefts tend to happen at either start or end of day. Frequently when guards change their shifts and before the museum is crowded who actually act as additional security staff.”

Advances in technology may have introduced new devices that can raise the alarm more quickly and efficiently, but it has also given thieves new tools with which to bypass security measures. In the city, the robbers accessed the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and cut through a window with a battery-powered disc cutter.

An author said the conversation in the country about the historic building had primarily focused on crowd control in the past decade, and not as much on security.

The institution has an on-site brigade of about fifty permanent emergency personnel, but their purpose is mostly to protect the collection from fires and flooding. “There is no quick reaction team,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the safety of the Louvre all comes down to government support and money, and at present the nation simply has no money.”