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Entering the world’s most-visited museum in broad daylight, taking eight pieces of priceless Napoleonic jewellery and disappearing into Paris traffic on simple scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, executed for global fame and subsequent Hollywood film treatments.

Experts who observe trends in international art crime, however, see Sunday morning’s robbery at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the latest in a string of smash-and-grab thefts centered more on the material value 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 secondary concern to the thieves.

“One might wonder why thieves who want to steal expensive jewellery are breaking into a globally renowned museum rather than a Cartier store,” stated an expert in art recovery. “The answer is simple: it’s because these days a Cartier store is more secure.”

A series of violent retail store thefts indicate that many stores have strengthened their security in the past few years, with armed guards on their premises and wares no longer kept on display overnight. Cultural institutions, meanwhile, look more exposed, in part because of the inherent factor of being public-facing institutions in historic buildings, and partly the financial situation in many western countries.

“Since Covid, governments across the globe have reduced spending on police and the culture sector,” said Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it demonstrates how vulnerable our museums have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the objects – featuring necklaces made up of precious stones and hundreds of gems, the tiara of a historical figure featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a hugely valuable crown once possessed by a royal that the robbers left by the roadside on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the historical theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum, performed 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 millions, the theft of a £4.75m gold toilet from Blenheim Palace the same year, the 2017 robbery of a valuable item from a European museum or even a series 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 artefacts were to remain intact, experts say, the thieves would struggle to find a buyer. “There’s no way to trade something as recognizable as the museum's gems on the legal marketplace”, commented an art crime researcher of the a relevant organization.

“They would be immediately recognised, particularly given the Ministry of Culture has released images of the items. Even a private collector or an sales venue 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 loss of well-known works of art and would remain quiet out of shame. These days, as art thefts are more reported on, the storage and selling of stolen art is risky business for any criminal.

“Taking a Picasso, it has to stay complete or it becomes valueless, and you have to devise a scheme 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 collect a ransom.”

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

Altering stolen works by melting down or re-cutting does lower the worth. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with significant danger because modern cutting techniques give gems a larger and lighter appearance, and antique-cut stones would either draw unwanted attention or reduce value for a concealment.

Importantly, however, dismantling or reshaping removes the evidence of the theft. “I suspect that the Louvre thieves will try to bring the stolen goods to places with diamond expertise like a country, India or even as close as a city, and locate an expert to cut out the stones,” suggested Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already raised questions about security measures at the institution, with a leaked official review expected to be published next month criticising “significant” and “persistent” slow progress in updating systems and observing that security cameras were missing in multiple areas. But specialists say displaying valuable objects in historic buildings with a steady stream of visitors comes with dangers that are not possible to eliminate completely.

“Older structures are more difficult to secure,” 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 can’t fit them with secure windows.”

The most solid protective measures for structures should be designed “as a stronghold”, said a security advisor. “There should be multiple levels to deter attackers.”

Contemporary structures are equipped with state-of-the-art external CCTV cameras or in-built seismic detectors that alert about a broken glass in real time, but old museums may be hesitant to uglify their appearance. Detection devices can be hard to fit to stuccoed ceilings. Sensors may also have to be disabled during the daytime as hordes of visitors walk through a museum.

The timing of the robbery, which occurred between morning hours in Paris, was common of recent thefts, Stürmann said. “It's logical why robberies tend to happen at either start or end of day. It’s often when guards rotate and prior to the museum is crowded who effectively act as additional security staff.”

Technological progress may have introduced new gadgets that can notify more quickly and efficiently, but it has also given thieves new methods with which to circumvent protections. In Paris, the thieves reached the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and breached a window with a electric tool.

Elaine Sciolino said the discussion in the country about the historic building had mostly centered on crowd control in the past decade, and not as much on protection.

The institution has an in-house brigade of about fifty permanent firefighters, but their mission is mostly to safeguard the artworks from blazes and water damage. “There is no rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the safety of the Louvre all comes down to political will and funding, and currently France simply has no money.”