Theft at 'badly managed' Louvre

The Louvre is the world's biggest museum

The Louvre in Paris has admitted two 18th century silver candlesticks have been stolen - just days after a report slammed the museum for poor security and management.

The Louvre announced the loss on Monday and said it had reported the theft to the police.

The candlesticks, 24cm high and worth an estimated 30,000 euros (£18,400), were first reported missing in December and after a search failed to recover them a report was made to the police on 21 January.

Director Henri Loyrette has promised improvements

The famous museum was roundly criticised last week in a study by the French national audit office, the Cour des Comptes.

The report, released on Thursday, identified waste, bad management, waste and security failures.

It said that some workers often took extra days off, or went on coffee breaks lasting for hours.

And the auditors also said the Louvre did not know how many works of art it had - and was "reduced to making a rough estimation" of about 400,000 artifacts.

The loss of the candlesticks is only the most recent of a series of security breaches.

In May 1988 a painting - Camille Corot's Le Chemin De Sevres- was stolen from a gallery which had no CCTV surveillance.

Da Vinci's Mona Lisa hangs in The Louvre

The painting has never been recovered.

In January of the same year, a marble statue was also stolen from one of the museum's study galleries.

Museum director Henri Loyrette, who was appointed in March 2001, has accepted many of the criticisms in the recent report, but promises that things will improve by 2003.

For its part, the museum has complained that inadequate funding and a lack of sufficient security personnel has forced it to keep up to 20% of its collections closed to the public.

Some six million people visited the Louvre last year.