I'm not sure how your brain works, but on hearing that thieves had broken into the Louvre with a long, long ladder, I immediately thought of William Blake.
If I might be permitted to go a bit "Dan Brown" for a moment, Blake (1757-1827) seems to have foreseen the raid 232 years ago. He created the illustration "I want! I want!", shown above, in 1793.
The two scenes are superficially similar, but look again. Blake's ladder is ascending to the Moon. The jewel thieves used their ladder to reach the Apollo Gallery (a name intimately associated with Moon landings, even if Apollo was the Sun god).
The connections run deeper. Count the stars in the Blakeian firmament. It's seven, with the Moon itself as an eighth jewel in the night sky. The Louvre robbers got away with eight precious jewels.
I then read that the crooks had dropped Empress Eugénie's crown while making their escape. Surely Blake hadn't foreseen this detail? Step forward the c.1803 watercolour 'The Four and Twenty Elders Casting their Crowns before the Divine Throne', which is surely the world's greatest work of art devoted to the discarding of crowns...
Blake, noted for his visionary imagery, even coded the Louvre's magnificent pyramid into one of his most famous paintings:
We don't know, at the time of writing, who the robbers were or whether they'll be caught. All I can say is that Blake painted several depictions of thieves being tortured and killed. Most prominent is The Punishment of the Thieves, owned by the Tate.
If I were the French police, I'd be making inquiries at the serpent house of Paris Zoo.
NB: Obviously, all of the above is tongue-in-cheek... but I've always wanted to start a conspiracy theory.
