The Salt Cellar (Saliera)
Benvenuto Cellini (1500 to 1571) · 1540 to 1543
On an ebony base rests a small golden world. Two reclining figures face each other with their legs entwined: Neptune, god of the sea, holding a trident beside a boat shaped bowl for salt, and Tellus, the earth, resting one hand on a tiny temple that opens to hold pepper. Around the base run figures of the winds, the times of day and the seasons in coloured enamel, and the whole thing is a little under thirty centimetres high. It is the only surviving work in precious metal by Benvenuto Cellini, the most celebrated goldsmith of the Renaissance, and it is often called the Mona Lisa of sculpture.
Cellini designed the piece in Rome for a cardinal, who declined it as too ambitious, then made it in Paris for King Francis the First of France between 1540 and 1543. Salt and pepper came from sea and land, so the sea god and the earth goddess embrace, and the legs intertwined were, Cellini wrote, like the arms of the sea reaching into the land. Look closely at the details: the sea horses and fish under Neptune, the elephant beneath Tellus, the tiny rollers of ivory set into the base so that the object could be pushed along the royal table. The enamel is still brilliant after nearly five centuries.
The salt cellar came to the Habsburgs in 1570 as a gift from the French king to Archduke Ferdinand of Tyrol and was kept at Ambras Castle before entering the Vienna Kunstkammer. In May 2003 a thief climbed scaffolding on the museum facade, smashed a window and took it; the building's alarm was dismissed as a fault. It was found three years later buried in a lead box in a forest near Zwettl, undamaged, after the thief was traced through a mobile phone. It now sits in its own case at the heart of the Kunstkammer, and it is smaller than most people expect.
Did You Know? The salt cellar was stolen in 2003 and recovered in 2006 from a lead box buried in an Austrian forest, after the thief tried to ransom it by text message.
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