Saliera (Salt Cellar)

In the early hours of 11 May 2003 a man climbed the builders' scaffolding on the front of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, smashed a window and left with this salt cellar. An alarm did go off, but it was taken for a false one, and the loss was only noticed that morning. The thief then sent ransom demands. In January 2006 police published pictures of him buying a mobile phone, and within days he led them to a forest near Zwettl, north of Vienna, where the Saliera lay buried in a lead box. He turned out to be a specialist in alarm systems.

What he had taken is the only major piece of Cellini's goldsmith work known to survive. Cellini made it in Paris for the French king Francis I and finished it in 1543. Neptune, the sea god, and a goddess of the earth sit facing each other with their legs interlaced, the way land and sea run into each other. The little boat beside Neptune held the salt, and the small temple beside the goddess held the pepper. It came to Austria in 1570 as a gift from Charles IX of France to Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol, who had stood in for the king at his wedding by proxy.