No strays? No Leonardus? We’re lucky because the Louvre invaders had terrible taste in art Art theft

I’m angry. My instructions were quite clear: break into the Louvre, head to… Denon suite Leonardo da Vinci handed it to me. Instead what did they do? You brought me trinkets! Stand there, above the trap door. A little more to the right.

It would be nice to think that an evil art collector somewhere was punishing the Louvre invaders for their bad taste. Security around the Mona Lisa has certainly improved since it was last stolen in 1911, but other Leonardo paintings in the museum hang on the wall like the others. There are so many beauties, so many peaceful galleries, dotted around this vast former palace: thieves would have come away with a Chardin still life, or a Rogier van der Weyden, an ancient statuette from Mesopotamia.

Obviously I’m glad they didn’t. My first reaction when I heard about the robbery on Sunday morning was relief. It is an art treasure, but in a well-planned mission the thieves used an extension ladder on a truck to enter the Galerie d’Apollon and seize a collection of ancient royal knick-knacks. Despite persistent reports of the theft of the “priceless French Crown Jewels,” this is nothing like the theft of the British Crown Jewels, which symbolize our still-monarchical nation. France has not had royals for a long time, so these are mysterious relics.

Among the stolen items were a necklace and earrings that belonged to Marie Amelie, wife of 19th-century King Louis Philippe and the last queen of France. After his rule ended in the revolution of 1848, he was exiled to Britain and died in Surrey in 1866. Then Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of the original Emperor Napoleon, seized power. The thieves also seized a tiara and brooch for his wife, Empress Eugenie, who died in Madrid in 1920, 50 years after her husband was overthrown.

Got all of that? This is the kind of French constitutional history that gave me a headache as an A-level student. Even the stolen emerald necklace and earrings associated with Napoleon’s original and more spectacular version belonged to his second wife, Marie-Louise, not to the famous Josephine. I think the French Minister of Culture had to suppress a chuckle while claiming that these items have “invaluable heritage value.”

No, it’s not about history, let alone art. It concerns the rubies, emeralds, diamonds, gold and silver that are set in it. It doesn’t take an art detective to figure out that the thieves who carried out a burglary that discarded all of the Louvre’s cultural treasures for these meaningless items are ruthlessly preying on the precious materials from which they were made. Is this part of a new kind of “art” theft that is not related to art at all?

The thieves who lifted Maurizio Cattelan’s gold toilet from Blenheim Palace in 2019 were not interested in Cattelan’s art (who is he, really?) but the gold they were able to sell in a matter of days. Pigeons literally melted into the inexhaustible market for precious metals. It seems very likely that the Louvre’s Crown Jewels will be dismantled and their valuable items sold as jewels and minerals of unknown origin, unless the fraudsters are caught first.

This is much more practical than trying to sell a world-famous masterpiece. Stealing “classical” works of art is irrational and doesn’t really work. When thieves seized The Scream from the Munch Museum in Oslo, they had no idea what to do with it. The painting, the Oslo police told me, was badly damaged as a result of being kept in a wet truck before it was recovered. How can you really keep this code underground for so long? The theft of Caravaggio’s Birth by the Palermo mafia almost certainly led to this great work being destroyed and reduced to worthless bits of cloth and dye. But precious stones and metals are still valuable.

The thieves probably don’t immediately plan to dismantle everything. Some of the royal jewels taken from the Green Vault at Dresden Castle in 2019 were recovered in Berlin in 2022. But the raid in Dresden – a city home to artistic masterpieces such as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna and Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus – adds to evidence that thieves are targeting gems and precious metals from museums rather than going to the trouble of trying to cash in. From a famous painting.

Conversely, this may be good news for the custodians of the world’s great art. The Louvre will look to its security, but perhaps the art’s real security lies in its ever-increasing fame, as lesser-known sculptures and paintings can be searched for instantly online.

When Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington was stolen from the National Gallery in 1961, James Bond production designer Ken Adam cleverly placed it on the wall in Dr. No’s lair, the joke being that only a Specter-type supervillain could commit such a crime. Turns out the true story, about a retired Newcastle bus driver, has a love story of its own. But anything romantic or complacent about art theft is a thing of the past. The Louvre bullying crime suggests that any interest in art by the underworld has been replaced by cold greed. They believe that art is fragile. Diamonds are forever.