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Entering the planet's most popular art institution in broad daylight, grabbing eight pieces of priceless historical gems and vanishing into the city traffic on simple scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, executed for global fame and subsequent movie adaptations.

Experts who observe patterns in international art crime, however, see Sunday morning’s robbery at the Louvre as a more practical matter: the most recent 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 pattern that has emerged over the last decade in Europe, Britain and the US. The venue, they propose, would have been of lesser importance to the criminals.

“You may ask why criminals who want to take expensive jewellery are entering a world-famous museum rather than a luxury jewelry store,” said Christopher A Marinello. “The answer is simple: it’s because these days a high-end boutique is more secure.”

A spate of aggressive jewellery shop thefts mean that many outlets have strengthened their security in recent years, with armed guards on their locations and wares no longer kept on display overnight. Museums, meanwhile, look vulnerable, 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.

“Since Covid, authorities across the globe have cut back on law enforcement and the arts funding,” said Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it shows how vulnerable our museums have become. This is a horrible 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 containing nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive diadem once owned by a royal 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 Louvre, carried out by the worker the thief.

Better comparisons may be the 2019 theft of valuables from a German institution worth over millions, the taking of a £4.75m gold toilet from Blenheim Palace the that year, the recent robbery of a large gold coin from a European museum or even a spate of robberies of sports memorabilia from American institutions.

“It's a clear trend here,” explained Marinello. “Smash, grab, and melt it down as rapidly as possible.”

If the items were to remain intact, specialists say, the thieves would find it hard to sell them. “It's impossible to trade something as recognizable as the Louvre’s jewels on the legal marketplace”, said Lynda Albertson 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 sales venue would want to see documentation establishing proper ownership before handling such remarkable pieces.”

In the past, institutions were often hesitant to announce publicly about the loss of well-known works of art and would remain quiet out of shame. Now, as cultural robberies are more widely publicised, the storage and sale of taken items is risky business for any lawbreaker.

“If you steal a famous painting, it has to remain intact or it becomes worthless, and you have to devise a plan to keep it in hiding, maybe by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” noted Marinello. “And you’re constantly exposed to the risk of an accomplice telling the police to collect a reward.”

For comparable factors, an investigator said it was vanishingly unlikely that the theft had been ordered. “Stolen to order 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 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 reduce the worth. When it comes to gems, it also comes with significant danger because contemporary methods give stones a larger and brighter surface area, and antique-cut stones would either attract notice or reduce value for a concealment.

Crucially, however, melting down or re-cutting eliminates the evidence of the crime. “I suspect that the robbers will try to take the items to locations with gem knowledge like Israel, another nation or even as nearby as Antwerp, and locate an expert to cut out the gems,” said Marinello.

The robbery at the Louvre has already raised questions about security measures at the institution, with a leaked state auditor report expected to be published soon criticising “significant” and “ongoing” slow progress in modernizing equipment and observing that surveillance were missing in multiple areas. But specialists say showing valuable objects in historic buildings with a steady stream of visitors comes with risks that are not possible to eliminate completely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to protect,” said Erin Thompson. “Many of them have large accessible windows that makes it easy for criminals to escape, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you can’t fit them with secure windows.”

The best protective measures for structures should be conceptualised “like a fortress”, noted Peter Stürmann. “It should include several layers to repel attackers.”

Contemporary structures are fitted with state-of-the-art surveillance systems or integrated vibration sensors that raise alarm about a smashed window in real time, but old museums may be hesitant to uglify their exteriors. Laser scanners can be difficult to fit to decorated surfaces. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be turned off during the day as hordes of visitors walk through a museum.

The schedule of the Louvre raid, which took place between 9.30am and 9.40am in Paris, was common of modern robberies, Stürmann said. “It's logical why thefts tend to happen at either opening or closing times. It’s often 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 rapidly and effectively, but it has also provided thieves new methods with which to bypass security measures. In the city, the thieves reached the museum’s upper level with a vehicle-mounted ladder and breached a window with a electric tool.

An author said the discussion in France about the historic building had mostly focused on crowd control in the past decade, and not as much on security.

The institution has an in-house brigade of about fifty permanent firefighters, but their purpose is mostly to protect the artworks from fires and water damage. “There isn't a rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the security of the Louvre all depends on political will and funding, and currently the nation lacks sufficient money.”