# Saliera (Salt Cellar of Francis I) > Benvenuto Cellini - 1540-1543 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/benvenuto-cellini/cellini-saliera-vienna/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-03 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Benvenuto Cellini - **Date:** 1540-1543 - **Medium:** Gold, hammered and chased, with vitreous enamel, on a base of ebony with gilt mounts; ivory elements are recorded in the museum's own materials list - **Dimensions:** 28.5 x 21.5 x 26.3 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum's own published figures). Wikipedia and other secondary sources give a differing 26.3 x 28.5 cm / 10.4 x 11.2 in without ascribing the figure to a named cataloguer; this record follows the holding institution. - **Object type:** Goldsmith's work - **Period:** Renaissance and Mannerist Europe, mid-sixteenth century, made at the French royal court - **Current location:** Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Kunstkammer, Room XXIX - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A gold table sculpture just under thirty centimetres across, made for Francis I of France between 1540 and 1543, and the only work in gold universally accepted as being by Benvenuto Cellini's own hand. Neptune and the earth goddess recline across an oval base, their legs interlaced to signify where sea runs into land, holding a ship for salt and a small temple for pepper; the king who owned it is present only in his emblems, a salamander and a coat of arms, so that the object reads as an allegory of a king ruling the whole compassed world while he seasons his food.It survived where its royal companions in gold and silver, made in the same commission, did not, and it survived a criminal history as vivid as its art-historical one: stolen from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in under a minute in 1993 by a security-alarm engineer who had inspected the building's defences, held for nearly three years while its thief tried to ransom it back to the museum's own insurer by text message, and recovered undamaged, or nearly so depending on which account is read, from a lead box buried in an Austrian forest in January 2006.Its passage from the French crown to Vienna was itself a piece of sixteenth-century diplomacy: given by Charles IX of France to his new wife's uncle as thanks for standing in for him at a proxy wedding meant to bind the French crown to the Habsburgs. It has been the single most recognisable object in the Kunsthistorisches Museum's Kunstkammer since 1891, and the theft has become, whether the museum intends it or not, part of what visitors are told about it today. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1539-1540** Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este (Cardinal of Ferrara) `[documented]` (commission (abandoned)) Commissioned a model for a salt cellar from Cellini in Rome, then declined to have it executed in precious metal on grounds of cost and time, after his adviser Gabriello Cesano warned it would take ten men's working lives to finish. Cellini kept the wax model. - **1540-1543** Francis I, King of France `[documented]` (commission and manufacture) Cellini showed his existing wax model to Francis I at the French court; the king ordered it carried out in gold immediately and provided a thousand crowns of gold for the material. Completed and delivered by 1543, per Cellini's own detailed account in his autobiography. - **1543-1570** French royal crown (Francis I and his successors) `[documented]` (ownership) Remained French crown property following Francis I's death in 1547 until Charles IX gave it away in 1570. The intervening custodial detail, which residence held it and whether it was displayed, is not established in sources consulted; recorded as a gap in an otherwise documented span. - **1570-10-26-1570** Gift transaction `[documented]` (gift) Given by Charles IX of France to Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol at Speyer, in gratitude for Ferdinand standing as Charles's proxy at his wedding (by proxy) to Elisabeth of Austria, held at Speyer Cathedral on 22 October 1570; the couple were married in person the following month at Mezieres. The marriage was arranged to bind the French crown to the Habsburgs during the French Wars of Religion. - **1570-c. 1806-1891** Archduke Ferdinand II of Tyrol and successors, Kunstkammer, Ambras Castle `[documented]` (display) Held in Ferdinand II's Kunstkammer at Ambras Castle near Innsbruck, one of the defining princely collections of the Renaissance and now regarded as the oldest surviving purpose-built museum in the world. The Ambras holdings were transferred to Vienna progressively over the nineteenth century; the exact stages are not consistently dated across sources consulted. - **1891-2003-05-11** Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna `[documented]` (acquisition (institutional transfer) and display) Entered the Kunsthistorisches Museum's collection with the rest of the former imperial Kunstkammer upon the museum's opening in 1891, and remained on view in the Kunstkammer until the 2003 theft. - **2003-05-11-2006-01-21** Robert Mang (theft and concealment) `[documented]` (theft) Stolen from its display case during the night of 11 May 2003, in well under a minute, after the thief climbed exterior restoration scaffolding and broke a window; the alarm was triggered and dismissed as false by museum security. Held by the thief for close to three years, reportedly under his own bed for much of that time, before an extortion attempt led to his identification. - **2006-01-21-present** Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna `[documented]` (recovery and return) Recovered by police, led by Robert Mang himself to a forest near Brand, Zwettl district, Lower Austria, where it had been buried in a lead-lined box. Returned briefly to display in early 2006, withdrawn for conservation (extent disputed between sources), and returned permanently to the Kunstkammer on 14 March 2006, where it remains. ## Open questions - What happened to the Saliera between 1543 and 1570 while it remained French crown property is not established by any source consulted: which royal residence held it, whether it was displayed or used again after the single dinner Cellini records, and how it passed from Francis I through three successor kings to Charles IX. - The exact date and mechanism of the object's transfer from Ambras Castle to the new Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is inconsistently given across sources, some pointing to piecemeal nineteenth-century transfers and others simply to the museum's 1891 opening. - Whether Robert Mang's professional knowledge as an alarm-systems installer was the actual enabling cause of the theft, or a colourful coincidence amplified after the fact by press coverage, cannot be resolved from the sources consulted: accounts differ on whether he had specifically scouted the museum's defences in advance or acted on a drunken impulse during a single busy night. - The exact number, amount, and sequence of ransom demands is inconsistently reported. A figure of ten million euros is the most widely repeated, but five-million-euro and thirteen-million-dollar figures also appear in reputable-seeming reporting, and this record cannot establish whether these reflect separate demands, currency-conversion confusion, or simple error. - The object's condition on recovery in January 2006 is reported inconsistently: English-language sources state it was undamaged, German-language sources describe specific scratches and chipped enamel requiring roughly three weeks of conservation. No published conservation report was located to settle the question. - Whether Robert Mang's original four-year sentence was genuinely increased to five years on appeal in 2007, and the exact date of his release, are reported only in a single tertiary source (the German Wikipedia article) and could not be independently corroborated from a primary or contemporary wire-service account in the time available. - What became of Robert Mang after his release from prison is not addressed in any source consulted. - Whether any part of Cellini's original wax or silver model, made in Rome for Cardinal Ippolito II d'Este before the piece was ever commissioned in gold, survives in any form is not addressed in the sources consulted. ## Sources - [1] Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, translated by John Addington Symonds. Project Gutenberg EBook #4028. Primary source: Cellini's own account of the commission, design and completion of the salt cellar. - [2] Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, official object database entry for the Saliera. - [3] Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, press release via OTS, 'Saliera wieder im Kunsthistorischen Museum zu sehen', 31 January 2006. Primary institutional source for the object's return to display and the described security measures. - [4] Wikipedia, 'Cellini Salt Cellar'. Tertiary source, consolidating the theft, the trial and the iconography; flagged for replacement with primary Austrian court and museum documentation where possible. - [5] Wikipedia (German), 'Saliera'. Tertiary source, materially more detailed than the English article on the provenance chain, the extortion timeline, the object's condition on recovery, and the trial and appeal; flagged for replacement with primary Austrian sources. - [6] JSTOR Daily, 'Benvenuto Cellini and the World's Most Spectacular Salt Cellar'. - [7] ARCAblog (Association for Research into Crimes against Art), 'The Art Theft of Cellini's Saliera: Security Scrutiny in a high profile theft', October 2012. - [8] Priceless (blog), 'The Vienna Art History Museum Robbery'. - [9] beyondarts.at, 'The theft of the Saliera', Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna visitor guide. - [10] wien.ORF.at, 'Kriminalfall Saliera vor zehn Jahren geklaert', ten-year retrospective on the case. - [11] noe.ORF.at, 'Saliera vor 15 Jahren entdeckt', retrospective on the recovery, consulted for corroboration of the Zwettl-district recovery location. - [12] Today.com (Associated Press), 'Thief of $65 million painting is sentenced', September 2006. - [13] Ars Electronica Center, 'Saliera', on the object's high-resolution digital display at the Center's Deep Space installation. - [14] Wikipedia, 'Ippolito II d'Este'. Consulted specifically to correct the misdating of the Cardinal of Ferrara found in the English Wikipedia article on the Saliera itself. - [15] Wikipedia, 'Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria', for the Ambras Kunstkammer and Ferdinand's role as governor of Tyrol. - [16] Wikipedia, 'Elisabeth of Austria, Queen of France', for the 1570 proxy wedding date and the dynastic context of the marriage. - [17] Wikipedia, 'Rospigliosi Cup', consulted to verify the attribution history used for comparison; the object itself is separately recorded in this publication. - [18] Andritz Pumps Magazine, 'The Salieria robbery'. - [19] SEM-EDS Micro-Analytical Data from Enamel Samples of Cellini's Salt Cellar 'Saliera', ResearchGate listing. Only the abstract and citation were accessible; the full paper returned an access error on repeated attempts and has not been directly verified. - [20] visitingvienna.com, 'The Saliera at the Kunsthistorisches Museum', consulted for the object's current presentation to visitors and audio-guide status. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.