Masked thieves stole priceless jewels from the Louvre on Sunday morning. The Paris museum has suffered a string of successful art heists, dating back to the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911.
The Louvre Museum in Paris is closed after masked thieves stole priceless jewels in what officials have described as a seven-minute heist in broad daylight.
Shortly after the museum opened on Sunday morning, two bandits used a lift on a truck to break into its Galerie d’Apollon, which houses the French crown jewels and other treasures, through a second-floor window. That’s according to the Paris prosecutor’s office, which is looking for four male suspects.
The thieves smashed display cases, stealing what a Louvre spokesperson described as eight items of « inestimable cultural and historical value. » They then fled toward a nearby highway on high-powered scooters. Two pieces of jewelry — including the crown of Empress Eugénie, the wife of Napoleon III — were found near the museum afterward.
The heist deals a huge blow to one of the most popular museums in the world, which houses valuable works like Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and has drawn some 9 million visitors in recent years.
But it’s not a first. Thieves have raided the Louvre multiple times over the decades — and once managed to snatch Mona Lisa herself right off the wall.A heist made the Mona Lisa famous
The Louvre was built in the 12th century as a military fortress, and by the 14th century was used as a royal residence and art collection center.
The revolutionary government opened the Louvre as a public museum, the Musée Central des Arts, in 1793. It displayed art that had previously been held in the royal collection, embodying the Enlightenment ideals that had ignited the French Revolution four years earlier.
The Louvre now boasts some 35,000 works on permanent display. And despite its fortified history, it has fallen victim to multiple high-profile security breaches, including the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa.
On a Monday morning that August, Vincenzo Peruggia, an Italian handyman who had briefly worked at the Louvre, donned his old uniform, walked into the museum and, when the coast was clear, took the painting right off the wall. He slipped it out of its frame in a nearby stairwell and carried it out of the building underneath his smock.
At this time, the Mona Lisa was not widely known outside the art world. And because the museum was in the practice of briefly taking paintings off the walls to photograph them, the Mona Lisa’s disappearance went unnoticed for a whopping 28 hours — at which point it quickly became international news.
« The Mona Lisa becomes this incredibly famous painting, literally overnight », writer and historian James Zug told NPR in 2011, a century later.
In fact, the heist got so much attention that Peruggia decided not to try to sell it and stashed it away in the false bottom of a trunk instead.
