The great art heist

When did this crime wave start?

The blitz began on a Sunday morning in Paris in October 2025. The Louvre had already opened its doors to visitors when thieves climbed up the outside of the building on a truck-mounted ladder, opened a window with power tools, and slipped into the venerable museum’s Apollo Gallery, home to France’s crown jewels. After threatening security guards, they cut through glass display cases to nab more than $100 million worth of national treasures. The whole thing took less than seven minutes, and of that haul only one crown, dropped by the robbers on their way out, has been recovered. Several people were arrested in connection with the break-in, but that hasn’t prevented “a plague of copycats,” Arthur Brand, a private art detective, told The New York Times. “Thieves all around the world see the Louvre and they think ‘Hey, don’t we have a local museum?’”

Which other museums have been hit?

There have been more than a dozen big heists over the last year, nearly all in Europe, spanning the continent from Wales to the Mediterranean. Hours after the Louvre heist, thieves lifted 2,000 gold and silver coins from a museum three hours from Paris that’s dedicated to philosopher Denis Diderot. Near Parma, Italy, in March this year, a gang busted through the gate of the Magnani Rocca Foundation with a tractor and left with paintings by Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse. A Burgundy museum lost its prized gold artifact, the 2,500-year-old torque of Vix, after a daytime robbery in July. The following month, maskless thieves paid for tickets to Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), where they freed a 200- carat diamond-and-platinum necklace from its display case with 41 hammer blows. Burglars swiped two Renoirs from the artist’s eponymous French Riviera museum in September. The trend hasn’t yet hit the U.S., but more than 1,000 historic artifacts were stolen from an Oakland museum’s off-site storage facility last year.

What happens to the stolen items?

Contraband paintings are tough to sell, because reputable art dealers can easily sniff them out. And black-market customers, knowing the risk of buying a recognizable work, will typically only cough up about 10% of the actual value. More commonly, thieves will try to force the museums to pay a ransom for the paintings, hold them as collateral in criminal deals with other gangs, or use them as a bargaining chip to negotiate for a lighter sentence in a different crime. That means paintings are a bit easier to recover: Works from the Parma and Renoir museums have now been returned. Coins, crowns, and jewels, though, are often melted down or recut into smaller gems, obliterating their historical value and making them harder to trace. “This destroys us,” said Fulgencio José Cerdán, the mayor of a Spanish town that saw its Bronze Age collection of gold artifacts stolen from a local museum in August. “It’s part of our heritage.” Thieves seek gold because the price has surged, hitting nearly $5,600 an ounce earlier this year — up 134% over 2024 prices. That makes even the riskiest break-ins worthwhile, and it’s why the recent thefts are much more brazen than the sneaky capers of the past.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.

Sign up

What’s different about these heists?

They are faster and more violent. Museum theft “has always existed,” said Anthony Amore, head of security at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but “is without question spiking.” In 1990, the Gardner lost 13 masterpieces worth a combined $500 million, an unsolved robbery that was heavy on subterfuge, with the suspects disguising themselves as cops and spending over an hour inside. In 1911, one Louvre employee hid in the museum overnight and nicked the Mona Lisa; he was caught when he tried to sell it. But today’s burglars, who often form ad hoc teams recruited via social media, have replaced deception with brute force. According to an August Europol report, they’re “breaching premises and display cases using tools such as sledgehammers, axes, crowbars and, in some instances, explosives,” often in broad daylight. They’re also quick, sometimes getting in and out in as little as three minutes.

Why are museums so vulnerable?

Museums are soft targets that tend to have much less security than high-end jewelry stores. The Louvre’s single security camera outside the Apollo Gallery didn’t cover the window the thieves used to enter and exit. Vienna’s MAK only installed metal detectors after the necklace robbery. Many European museums even lack a dedicated security chief. Lack of funding has played a role — France cut its heritage spending by $46 million in 2025 — but so has architecture. Europe’s museums are often housed in former palaces or mansions, and curators don’t want to “undermine the beauty or historical integrity” with security retrofits, says cultural heritage lawyer Walker Schulte Schneider. Modern museums may have better security technology than their predecessors, but their designs aren’t foolproof, either. Glass facades enhance visibility, skylights serve as entry points, and spacious open galleries create blind spots.

What is being done to harden them?

Museum officials everywhere are waking up. Weeks after the Louvre heist, the museum announced an $89 million security plan and put in charge the veteran police officer who had modernized security for the Paris transport system. For smaller museums, some of which have remained closed since being targeted, experts recommend displaying replicas in lieu of their most cherished possessions or even taking priceless exhibits down altogether. While ramping up security seems like a no-brainer, museums have to consider the effect on the visitor experience. People “engage more deeply when they can approach an object, examine its detail,” Guy Turton, an audience strategist, told the BBC. “Greater distance and more prominent barriers can weaken that connection.”