The Salt Cellar
Vienna, 10 May 2003. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is undergoing renovation. Scaffolding climbs the exterior. Overnight, a fifty-year-old alarm systems technician named Robert Mang — a man whose day job was installing and servicing museum security — climbs that scaffolding, removes a window, disables the alarm, and walks out with the Saliera.
The Saliera is a 26-centimetre gold-and-enamel salt cellar made by Benvenuto Cellini for King Francis I of France, completed in 1543. It is considered one of the greatest surviving works of Renaissance goldsmithing. Insured for fifty million euros. Genuinely priceless.
Mang had no buyer, no contacts, and no plan. He took it home, put it in a metal box, and buried it in a forest near Zwettl. It stayed there for three years while Interpol chased theories about Russian oligarchs and black market dealers. In 2006 — unable to sell it, unable to display it, unable to share its existence with anyone — he called the police himself.
Maren and Ellis on the loneliest art theft in modern European history.
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Schiphol Airport, the Netherlands, 4 AM on Friday 25 February 2005. Two men in KLM uniforms, in a stolen KLM cargo van, drive through a perimeter gate of the cargo terminal. The single guard with a clipboard waves them through — the uniforms are correct, the van logo is correct, it is a routine pre-dawn cargo movement. They drive across the tarmac to a holding bay where a sealed shipping container is waiting to be loaded onto a 6 AM KLM flight to Tel Aviv. The container holds approximately a hundred and eighteen million dollars in uncut industrial diamonds.
The Just Judges
Ghent, Belgium, the night of 10-11 April 1934. One panel of twelve, cut out of a fifteenth-century altarpiece in Saint Bavo's Cathedral. Never recovered. The single most famous unsolved art theft in northern European history.
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