Louvre heist leaves a cultural wound – and may turn French crown jewels into legend

The robbery at the Louvre has done what no marketing campaign ever could: It has catapulted France’s dusty crown jewels — long admired at home, little known abroad — to global fame.

- By THOMAS ADAMSON

One week on, the country is still wounded by the breach to its national heritage even as authorities Sunday announced arrests tied to the haul.

Yet the crime is also a paradox. Some say it will make celebrities of the very jewels it sought to erase — much as the Mona Lisa’s turn-of-the-20th-century theft transformed the then little-known Renaissance portrait into the world’s most famous artwork.

In 1911, a museum handyman lifted the Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece off its hook. The loss went unnoticed for more than a day; newspapers turned it into a global mystery, and crowds came to stare at the empty space. When the painting resurfaced two years later, its fame eclipsed everything else in the museum, and that remains so today.

That's the uneasy question shadowing Sunday’s robbery: whether a crime that cut deep will glorify what's left behind.

“Because of the drama, the scandal, the heist, the Apollo Gallery itself and the jewels that remain will likely receive a new spotlight and become celebrities, just like the Mona Lisa after 1911,” said Anya Firestone, a Paris art historian and Culture Ministry licensed heritage expert. She toured the gallery the day before the robbery and did not think it looked sufficiently guarded.