The theft of eight historic jewellery items from the crown-jewels display at the Louvre Museum in Paris has sent shockwaves through the global museum community.

In Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria is likely to face steeply increased security and insurance costs when it hosts the Cartier collection of jewellery next year.

At the Louvre, four criminals, within a few minutes, used a cherry picker that took advantage of adjacent construction/maintenance works, entered the museum via an upper-floor window on the Seine-facing facade, broke into display cases, and made a rapid getaway with eight priceless objects.

It was an audacious, precisely planned operation that exposed vulnerabilities even at one of the most secure cultural institutions in the world.

Such robberies are typi

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