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Breaking into the world’s most-visited museum in the middle of the day, taking eight items of invaluable 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.

Specialists who study 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 focused more on the material value of precious stones or metals than the historical importance, perpetuating a pattern that has emerged over the last decade in Europe, Britain and the US. The location, they propose, would have been of secondary concern 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 nowadays a Cartier store is more secure.”

A spate of aggressive jewellery shop thefts mean that many outlets have strengthened their protection in recent years, with armed guards on their locations and merchandise no longer kept on display overnight. Cultural institutions, meanwhile, look vulnerable, partly because of the inherent factor of being public-facing institutions in historic buildings, and also the current economic climate in many western countries.

“After the pandemic, authorities across the globe have reduced spending on law enforcement and the culture sector,” noted Marinello. “With criminals entering the Louvre, it shows how vulnerable our museums have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The robbery of the items – including jewelry pieces made up of precious stones and 631 diamonds, the tiara of Empress Eugénie containing nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive crown once owned by Napoleon III’s wife that the robbers dropped by the street on their way out – has inevitably been compared with the 1911 theft of the famous painting from the Louvre, performed by the Italian handyman Vincenzo Peruggia.

Better points of reference may be the 2019 burglary of jewellery from Dresden’s Green Vault Museum worth over €113m, the taking of a £4.75m gold toilet from Blenheim Palace the same year, the 2017 robbery of a large gold coin from a European museum or even a series of thefts of sports memorabilia from American institutions.

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

If the items were to stay whole, specialists say, the thieves would find it hard to find a buyer. “It's impossible to trade something as immediately identifiable as the museum's gems on the legal marketplace”, said Lynda Albertson of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art.

“They are too well-known, especially given the Ministry of Culture has published photos of the pieces. Even a individual buyer or an auction house would want to see documentation establishing proper ownership before touching such striking pieces.”

In the past, institutions were often hesitant to go public about the loss of well-known art pieces and would remain quiet out of embarrassment. These days, as art thefts are more reported on, the keeping 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 plan to keep it in hiding, maybe by passing it around difficult criminal actors,” said Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the danger of an accomplice informing authorities to cash in a ransom.”

For comparable factors, an investigator said it was vanishingly unlikely that the theft had been commissioned. “Stolen to order is something from Hollywood movies,” he said. “Nobody would touch this. It's global news and in all the media. If you buy this, if you get caught, you go to jail. You cannot show it to your friends, you cannot bequeath it to your children.”

Modifying taken items by dismantling or re-cutting does reduce the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with significant danger because modern cutting techniques give gems a bigger and lighter surface area, and antique-cut stones would either draw unwanted attention or reduce value for a concealment.

Crucially, however, dismantling or reshaping removes the proof of the theft. “I suspect that the Louvre thieves will try to bring the items to places with diamond expertise like Israel, another nation or even as nearby as Antwerp, and find someone to remove the stones,” said Marinello.

The heist at the Louvre has already raised questions about protective steps at the institution, with a leaked state auditor report expected to be published soon criticising “significant” and “persistent” delays in modernizing equipment and noting that security cameras were missing in multiple areas. But security experts say displaying valuable objects in older structures with a steady stream of visitors comes with dangers that are not possible to eliminate completely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to protect,” explained an art crime professor. “They often have large accessible windows that makes it easy for thieves to escape, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you are unable to install them with proper bulletproof glass.”

The best protective measures for buildings should be conceptualised “like a fortress”, noted Peter Stürmann. “There should be several layers to deter intruders.”

Modern buildings are equipped with advanced surveillance systems or in-built seismic detectors that raise alarm about a broken glass in immediately, but historic institutions may be reluctant to uglify their appearance. 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 robberies tend to happen at either opening or closing times. Frequently when security rotate and prior to the museum is crowded who effectively act as additional security staff.”

Technological progress may have introduced new gadgets that can raise the alarm more rapidly and efficiently, but it has also given robbers new methods with which to bypass protections. In the city, the robbers accessed the museum’s first-floor window with a vehicle-mounted ladder and cut through a glass pane 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 less on protection.

The institution has an in-house team of about 50 full-time emergency personnel, but their purpose is mainly to safeguard the artworks from blazes and flooding. “There isn't a rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the security of the Louvre all comes down to government support and funding, and at present France lacks sufficient resources.”