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Breaking into the world’s most-visited museum in the middle of the day, grabbing eight items of invaluable Napoleonic jewellery and vanishing into the city traffic on humble scooters may seem like the most audacious of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and subsequent movie adaptations.

Experts who study patterns in global cultural theft, however, see Sunday morning’s robbery at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the most recent in a series 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 appeared over the last decade in Germany, 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 globally renowned museum rather than a Cartier store,” stated an expert in art recovery. “It's straightforward: it’s because nowadays a Cartier store is more secure.”

A series of aggressive 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 shown overnight. Cultural institutions, meanwhile, look vulnerable, in part because of the in-built reason of being public-facing institutions in older structures, and partly the current economic climate in many western countries.

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

The theft of the items – featuring necklaces made up of eight sapphires and hundreds of gems, the crown of Empress Eugénie featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive diadem once owned by Napoleon III’s wife that the thieves dropped by the roadside on their way out – has naturally been compared with the historical theft of the Mona Lisa from the same museum, performed by the Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia.

Better points of reference may be the 2019 theft of jewellery from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over €113m, the theft of a £4.75m gold toilet from Blenheim Palace the same year, the 2017 robbery of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a series of robberies of collector items 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, experts say, the thieves would struggle to find a buyer. “It's impossible to trade something as recognizable as the museum's gems on the licit market”, said an art crime researcher of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They would be immediately recognised, particularly given the Ministry of Culture has published photos of the pieces. Even a private collector or an sales venue would want to see documentation confirming proper ownership before touching such remarkable pieces.”

In the past, institutions were often reluctant to announce publicly about the disappearance of well-known art pieces and would remain quiet out of shame. These days, 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 remain intact or it becomes valueless, and you have to conceive of a scheme to keep it in hiding, maybe by moving it among difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “And you’re constantly exposed to the risk of an partner informing authorities to cash in a ransom.”

For similar reasons, an art detective said it was highly improbable 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 media. If you acquire these, if you get caught, you go to jail. You cannot show it to your friends, you cannot bequeath it to your children.”

Altering stolen works by dismantling or reshaping does lower the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with considerable risk because contemporary methods give gems a bigger and lighter appearance, and antique-cut stones would either attract notice or reduce value for a concealment.

Crucially, however, dismantling or reshaping removes the evidence of the theft. “I suspect that the robbers will try to bring the items to places with diamond expertise like Israel, India or even as nearby as a city, and locate an expert to cut out the gems,” suggested Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already raised questions about security measures at the institution, with a unauthorized state auditor report expected to be published soon criticising “significant” and “persistent” slow progress in modernizing systems and observing that surveillance were missing in multiple areas. But security experts say displaying valuable objects in older structures with a steady stream of guests comes with risks that are not possible to remove entirely.

“Older structures are much harder to protect,” said Erin Thompson. “They often 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 security systems for buildings should be designed “as a stronghold”, noted Peter Stürmann. “It should include several layers to repel intruders.”

Modern buildings are fitted with advanced external CCTV cameras or in-built seismic detectors that raise alarm about a broken glass in immediately, but old museums may be reluctant to uglify their appearance. Laser scanners can be hard to fit 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 timing of the robbery, 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 effectively act as additional security staff.”

Technological progress may have thrown up new gadgets that can notify more quickly and efficiently, but it has also given robbers new methods with which to circumvent protections. In the city, the thieves accessed the museum’s first-floor window with a mobile equipment and breached a window with a battery-powered disc cutter.

An author said the conversation in the country about the 232-year-old building had primarily centered on visitor management in the past decade, and less on security.

The museum has an in-house brigade of about 50 full-time firefighters, but their purpose is mainly to safeguard the artworks from fires and flooding. “There is no rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “In the end, the security of the Louvre all depends on political will and funding, and currently France simply has no money.”