While the Louvre was closed on Tuesday, the museum continued beefing up its security, this time by installing bars on the window through which thieves entered the institution in October and stole bejeweled objects, most of which still have not yet been recovered.
The window faces into a space in the Galerie d’Apollon. The thieves reached the window from the outside using a ladder, then applied power tools to slice through the glass and come into the gallery.
After being denounced by politicians and the public alike, the museum promised to improve its security. Francis Steinbock, the Louvre’s deputy administrator, told the Agence France-Presse today that the bars marked one attempt to do just that.
“We had committed to doing it before the end of the year,” Steinbock said. He noted that the museum had plans to continue discussing “securing other windows.” Other planned security measures involve the installation of 100 security cameras.
Louvre director Laurence des Cars, who sought to resign from her post following the heist before being denied the opportunity to do so, had previously promised to install such a grille at the Galerie d’Apollon “before Christmas.” (A preexisting obstructive measure was removed from the window between 2003 and 2004, when the galleries underwent restoration, she said.) The museum went down to the wire—the bars were put in on December 23, two days before the holiday—but she lived up to her word.
The bars were put in the day after Bénédicte Savoy, a French art historian who is currently giving a series of lectures at the Louvre, gave a pointed interview to the New Yorker in which she addressed the heist. She said the theft was like a “rape,” though she admitted that may not be a “good comparison,” and said, “The main takeaway, for me, is that museums have a vulnerability—a technical, physical vulnerability—that is mirrored by the vulnerability of the public’s reaction, the idea that you can be culturally wounded in a profound collective manner.”
