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Entering the world’s most-visited museum in broad daylight, taking eight items of invaluable historical gems and vanishing into the city traffic on humble scooters may seem like the boldest of crimes, carried out for international notoriety and subsequent Hollywood film treatments.

Experts who observe patterns in global cultural theft, however, see Sunday morning’s heist at the Louvre as something more prosaic: the most recent in a string of quick-hit thefts centered more on the material value of precious stones or metals than the artifacts’ significance, continuing a pattern that has appeared over the last ten years in Germany, the UK and the US. The location, they suggest, would have been of lesser importance to the thieves.

“You may ask why criminals who want to take expensive jewellery are breaking into a world-famous museum rather than a Cartier store,” said Christopher A Marinello. “It's straightforward: it’s because nowadays a high-end boutique is more secure.”

A spate of aggressive jewellery shop thefts mean that many stores have beefed up their protection in the past few years, with armed guards on their locations and wares no longer kept on display overnight. Cultural institutions, on the other hand, look vulnerable, in part because of the in-built reason of being public-facing institutions in historic buildings, and also the financial situation in many western countries.

“After the pandemic, governments across the globe have cut back on police and the culture sector,” said Marinello. “If thieves can get into the Louvre, it shows how vulnerable our institutions have become. This is a difficult time to be a museum.”

The theft of the items – featuring jewelry pieces made up of eight sapphires and hundreds of gems, the tiara of a historical figure featuring nearly 2,000 diamonds and a extremely expensive crown once possessed 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 same museum, performed by the worker Vincenzo Peruggia.

More relevant points of reference may be the recent burglary of jewellery from a German institution worth over €113m, the theft of a multi-million pound valuable object from a UK landmark the that year, the recent heist of a valuable item from Berlin’s Bode Museum or even a series of robberies of sports memorabilia from US mining museums.

“There’s a simple pattern here,” said Marinello. “Break in, take items, and dismantle them as rapidly as possible.”

If the items were to stay whole, experts say, the criminals would struggle to find a buyer. “There’s no way 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 would be immediately recognised, especially given the cultural authorities has released images of the pieces. Even a private collector or an auction house would want to see paperwork establishing legal possession before touching such remarkable pieces.”

In the past, museums were often reluctant to announce publicly about the loss of well-known art pieces and would remain quiet out of shame. These days, as cultural robberies are more widely publicised, the keeping and sale of taken items is risky business for any lawbreaker.

“If you steal a Picasso, it has to remain intact or it becomes valueless, and you have to devise a plan to keep it in hiding, perhaps by moving it among dangerous individuals,” noted Marinello. “There's ongoing risk to the danger of an accomplice telling the police to collect a ransom.”

For similar reasons, 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 can't display it to your acquaintances, you cannot leave it to your children.”

Modifying taken items by dismantling or reshaping does lower the value. When it comes to diamonds, it also comes with significant danger because contemporary methods give gems a larger and brighter appearance, and older-style stones would either draw unwanted attention or reduce value for a concealment.

Crucially, however, dismantling or reshaping removes the proof of the theft. “My guess is that the robbers will try to take the items to locations with diamond expertise like a country, another nation or even as nearby as Antwerp, and find someone to remove the stones,” 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 released next month criticising “considerable” and “ongoing” delays in updating systems and observing that security cameras were lacking in many rooms. But specialists say displaying valuable objects in historic buildings with a steady stream of visitors comes with dangers that are impossible to remove entirely.

“Historic buildings are much harder to protect,” said an art crime professor. “They often have nice big street-facing windows that makes it easy for thieves to get away, and there may be preservation laws in place that mean you are unable to install them with secure windows.”

The best protective measures for buildings should be conceptualised “as a stronghold”, noted Peter Stürmann. “It should include several layers to repel attackers.”

Modern buildings are equipped with advanced surveillance systems or integrated seismic detectors that raise alarm about a broken glass in immediately, but old museums may be reluctant to alter their appearance. Laser scanners can be difficult to fit to stuccoed ceilings. Motion and sound detectors may also have to be disabled during the day as crowds walk through a museum.

The schedule of the Louvre raid, which occurred between 9.30am and 9.40am local time, was typical of modern robberies, Stürmann said. “It's logical why thefts tend to happen at either start or end of day. It’s often when guards change their shifts and before the museum is crowded who actually act as extra protection.”

Advances in technology may have thrown up new gadgets that can notify more quickly and effectively, but it has also provided robbers new methods with which to circumvent protections. In the city, the robbers accessed the museum’s upper level with a mobile equipment and cut through a window with a electric tool.

An author said the conversation in France about the 232-year-old building had primarily focused on visitor management in recent years, and not as much on protection.

The museum has an in-house team of about 50 full-time emergency personnel, but their purpose is mostly to safeguard the artworks from blazes and flooding. “There isn't a rapid-response unit,” Sciolino said. “Ultimately, the safety of the Louvre all depends on government support and money, and currently the nation simply has no money.”