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Breaking into the planet's most popular art institution in the middle of the day, grabbing eight items of invaluable historical gems and disappearing into the city traffic on simple scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and subsequent Hollywood film treatments.

Experts who observe patterns in international art crime, however, see the recent robbery at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the latest in a series of quick-hit thefts centered more on the material value of valuable gems or materials than the historical importance, perpetuating a pattern that has emerged over the last decade in Germany, the UK and the US. The location, they suggest, would have been of lesser importance to the thieves.

“One might wonder why criminals who want to steal expensive jewellery are breaking into 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 violent jewellery shop thefts mean that many stores have beefed up their protection in the past few years, with armed guards on their premises and merchandise no longer kept on display overnight. Museums, on the other hand, look more exposed, partly because of the inherent factor of being public-facing institutions in older structures, and also the financial situation in many western countries.

“Since Covid, authorities across the world have reduced spending on law enforcement and the culture sector,” noted Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it demonstrates 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 631 diamonds, the crown of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a hugely valuable diadem once possessed by a royal that the robbers dropped by the roadside on their way out – has naturally been compared with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum, performed by the worker Vincenzo Peruggia.

More relevant comparisons may be the recent theft of valuables from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over €113m, the taking of a multi-million pound valuable object from Blenheim Palace the that year, the 2017 heist of a large gold coin from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a spate of thefts of collector items from American institutions.

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

If the items were to stay whole, experts say, the thieves would find it hard to sell them. “It's impossible to trade something as immediately identifiable as the museum's gems on the legal marketplace”, commented an art crime researcher of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They would be immediately recognised, especially given the cultural authorities 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 remarkable pieces.”

In the past, museums were often reluctant to go public about the loss of famous art pieces and would stay silent out of embarrassment. Now, as art thefts are more reported on, the storage and selling of taken items is risky business for any criminal.

“Taking a Picasso, it has to stay complete or it becomes valueless, and you have to conceive of a scheme to keep it in hiding, perhaps by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “And you’re constantly exposed to the danger of an accomplice telling the police to cash in a ransom.”

For comparable factors, an investigator said it was vanishingly unlikely that the theft had been commissioned. “Commissioned theft is something from films,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. 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 acquaintances, you cannot bequeath it to your family.”

Modifying stolen works by melting down or re-cutting does reduce the worth. When it comes to gems, it also comes with significant danger because contemporary methods give stones a bigger and brighter appearance, and older-style stones would either draw unwanted attention or reduce value for a coverup.

Crucially, however, melting down or re-cutting removes the evidence of the theft. “I suspect that the robbers will try to bring the items to places with gem knowledge like Israel, India or even as close as a city, and locate an expert to remove the stones,” suggested Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already brought up concerns about security measures at the institution, with a unauthorized official review expected to be published soon pointing out “considerable” and “persistent” delays in modernizing equipment and observing that surveillance were missing in multiple areas. But specialists say showing precious items in historic buildings with a constant flow of visitors comes with dangers that are impossible to remove entirely.

“Historic buildings are more difficult to protect,” said an art crime professor. “They often have large accessible windows that allows for criminals to escape, and there may be building protection statutes in place that mean you can’t fit them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The best protective measures for structures should be designed “as a stronghold”, said Peter Stürmann. “It should include multiple levels to deter intruders.”

Contemporary structures are fitted with advanced external CCTV cameras or in-built seismic detectors that alert about a broken glass in immediately, but old museums may be reluctant to alter their appearance. Detection devices can be difficult 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 schedule of the robbery, which occurred between morning hours local time, was typical of recent thefts, Stürmann said. “It's logical why thefts tend to happen at either start or end of day. It’s often when security change their shifts and prior to the museum is full of visitors who effectively act as extra protection.”

Technological progress may have introduced new devices that can raise the alarm more quickly and efficiently, but it has also provided robbers new methods with which to circumvent security measures. In Paris, the thieves reached the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and cut through a window with a electric tool.

An author said the discussion in France about the 232-year-old structure had mostly focused on crowd control in the past decade, and less on protection.

The museum has an on-site brigade of about fifty full-time firefighters, but their mission is mostly to protect the artworks from blazes and flooding. “There is no rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the security of the Louvre all comes down to political will and funding, and at present France lacks sufficient resources.”