Mona Lisa to missing crown

The world’s largest art museum, the Louvre, holds around half a million objects, with about 30,000 on display and more than 8 million visitors a year. That’s a lot to watch over — especially on a Sunday.

In a cleverly executed operation, four men in fluorescent vests arrived at the Louvre in a flatbed truck around 9:30 a.m. Raising an extendable ladder to the second storey, they cut through a window, entered the Galerie d’Apollon and, using power tools, helped themselves to nine exquisite objects: France’s royal jewels, once owned by Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III.

For the thieves, that’s where the trouble begins. Such treasures can’t be worn or sold openly — their images are everywhere. The best hope is to melt the gold and sell the gems separately. Eugénie’s crown alone, dropped during the escape, contained over 2,400 diamonds and 56 emeralds — a fortune in fragments.

Any heist at the Louvre is a major blow, raising questions about both human and electronic security. Alarms sounded, guards acted swiftly, but the thieves were gone within seven minutes. Timing is everything in art theft. In 2019, Maurizio Cattelan’s America — an 18-karat gold toilet — was stolen from Blenheim Palace in just five and a half minutes. The culprits were caught, but not the toilet. In 2020, Van Gogh’s The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring was taken during a COVID closure and recovered three years later by Dutch art detective Arthur Brand.

In New Zealand, two Gottfried Lindauer portraits were ram-raided from an Auckland auction house in 2017 and returned five years later, barely damaged. And in 1986, Picasso’s Weeping Woman vanished from Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria, only to reappear two weeks later in a railway station locker — a protest, the thieves claimed, against poor arts funding.

Globally, art recovery rates are low — perhaps only 10 per cent. Paintings are hardest to move, their images too distinctive. Jewels and metalwork can be dismantled or melted down, their identity erased. Even so, hope remains. The Mona Lisa itself was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 and recovered two years later after the thief tried to sell it. The irony, of course, is that public collections exist to protect such treasures.

Security guards, often paid minimum wage, shoulder immense responsibility. Yet when budgets are cut, security is usually the first to go — as seen in the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ recent staff reductions. The Louvre thieves knew exactly what they wanted. We can only guess their motives. Their theft robs visitors of beauty, craftsmanship and history. Still, it’s hard not to recall how often France helped itself to others’ treasures. Perhaps, in some perverse sense, this is déjà vu.

Penelope Jackson’s Unseen: Art and Crime in Australia (Monash University Publishing) will be published in December 2025

The Conversation