VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) --Police said on Sunday they were investigating whether a priceless golden sculpture snatched overnight from Vienna's art history museum was stolen to order.
Police said the thieves smashed a window to get into the building and stole the solid gold piece from its glass display case without triggering the alarms.
The 16th century "Saliera" (salt cellar) is considered "the Mona Lisa of sculptures," the museum said. The 26 cm (10 inch) tall piece was the only remaining authenticated example of Italian master sculptor Benvenuto Cellini's work as a goldsmith.
"This is an art theft of gigantic proportions," museum director Wilfried Seipel told Austrian television. "The Saliera was worth at the very least 50 million euros ($57 million)."
Police said they believed the Saliera was stolen to order, as it was the only art work taken.
"The thieves climbed up some scaffolding to the first floor of the building, broke a window and climbed in. They shattered the glass display case, and took the sculpture," a police spokesman told Reuters.
"There were movement sensors all over the place -- we are currently investigating why the alarm did not go off."
The theft was discovered on Sunday morning. Police said they had notified Interpol and would work with British, German and Italian police to try to find the treasure.
Photo's: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/05/11/art.theft.austria.reut http://www.ananova.com/images/web/53752.jpg
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Theft took place 04:00 a.m., but remained unnoticed until 08:20 a.m.
Vienna's 'Mona Lisa of sculptures' stolen
Cellini's 'Saliera,' worth $57 million, taken from museum
Jeffrey Fleishman, Sonya Yee, Los Angeles Times Monday, May 12, 2003
Vienna -- Climbing scaffolding and smashing a window early Sunday, thieves slipped into Vienna's Art History Museum and -- despite high-tech motion sensors and round-the-clock guards -- disappeared with a 16th-century gold- plated masterpiece sculpted by Benvenuto Cellini.
The stealthy and stunning heist was one of the biggest art thefts in Europe in recent years. The intricate, 10-inch-high sculpture, known as the "Saliera, " or salt cellar, is valued at about $57 million.
It was commissioned from Cellini -- an outlaw himself and one of the Italian Renaissance's most ingenious goldsmiths -- in the 1540s by King Francois I of France.
Museum director Wilfried Seipel called the piece the "Mona Lisa of sculptures." Police in the Austrian capital said one or more thieves crawled through a broken second-floor window at 4 a.m, shattered the heavy-glass display case around the Saliera, grabbed the sculpture and fled. Police were investigating whether the robbery might have been an inside job.
The museum's alarms did go off, and all the artwork was protected by motion sensors and video cameras. The theft was discovered at 8:20 a.m. when a museum porter noticed the damage.
"The alarm was activated," Seipel told the Austrian TV network, ORF. "Why this wasn't reacted to in good time and as quickly as possible is being investigated at the moment. We had to release the three employees (guards) from work for the time being."
The thieves knew what they wanted and were most likely contracted, said Guenther Fuchs, an Austrian police spokesman.
A valuable Raphael painting hanging next to the Saliera was left untouched, and no other art vanished from the museum -- called in German the Kunsthistoriches -- which houses one of the best collections of classical art in Europe.
Austrian authorities have contacted Interpol, and the museum is offering an $80,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of the thieves and the recovery of the sculpture.
Seipel told the Austrian Press Agency that the thief was "either a crazy who saw the piece in an exhibition and wanted it for himself, or somebody who is looking to extort money. Hopefully no one gets the idea to melt it down."
The Saliera is an example of the delicate, finely articulated style of Renaissance art.
Merging gold, enamel, ebony and wax, it depicts a bearded man with a trident, symbolizing the sea, leaning back and resting upon the head of a horse. The man stares at a woman, symbolizing the Earth, whose legs are intertwined with his. The piece, according to art historians, is both a royal salt holder and "an allegorical representation of planet Earth."
Cellini, according to an Italian state-sponsored art Web site, was not only a master sculptor in gold and other media. He was prone to mystical trances and was a wordsmith, too. His "Autobiography" is self-promoting and laced with exaggeration, but it "remains a cornerstone of Italian literature."
Cellini wrote this about the Saliera: "In order to show how the sea is connected with the Earth, I made two figures. . . . The sea, depicted as a man,
holds a richly decorated ship. . . . The Earth, I depict as a woman, of such lovely form and as graceful as I knew how to create. Next to her I placed on the ground a richly decorated temple, which was intended to hold pepper."
When Cellini wasn't tinkering with gold, or casting bronze, he was running from the law.
He was wanted for beating people he didn't like and for the revenge killing of his brother's murderer. He also was "condemned for sodomy," according to the Italian Web site.
http://sfgate.com/
In Kuwait, Lost Items and a Blackened Museum Are Effects of Earlier War
By ALAN RIDING
KUWAIT, May 6 — Twelve years after United States-led forces ended Iraq's occupation of this small Persian Gulf state, the recent looting and burning of Iraqi cultural institutions have been painful reminders of what happened to the Kuwait National Museum in 1991, at the hands of the Iraqis. To this day, the museum remains closed, its main galleries still black from the fires set by retreating Iraqi forces.
Iraq's initial intention here was straightforward theft. In September 1990, six weeks after it invaded Kuwait, the government of Saddam Hussein exhibited the museum's collection on Iraqi television as war booty. About 20,000 art objects from the museum, including its valuable Islamic art collection, were then wrapped in old newspapers and 14th-century textiles and sent by truck to Baghdad, where they were stored in the Iraq Museum.
This proved to be lucky. As the Iraqi Army withdrew from Kuwait in March 1991, one of its last acts was to burn the museum's exhibition galleries. The only work of art to go up in flames was a delicately carved 14th-century wooden door from Fez, Morocco, which had been too large to transport to Baghdad. A few months later, the United Nations arranged for the return of the museum's collection to Kuwait City.
By then, 59 pieces from the Islamic art collection were missing. Only one of these objects — a 16th-century Mogul double-edged dagger, gold- set with rubies, emeralds and turquoise — has been recovered. Spotted in a catalog for a 1996 auction at Sotheby's in London, it was returned by the vendor, who said he had not known it was stolen when he bought it in Amman, Jordan.
One legacy of the Iraqi occupation can be seen at the Kuwait National Museum, where only a small ethnographic exhibition — evoking scenes from Bedouin and peasant life — is on display. The Islamic art collection, which belongs to Sheik Nasser Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah and his wife, Sheika Hussah Sabah al-Salim al-Sabah, and was on permanent loan to the museum, is now stored in the couple's large home here.
It was this collection that gave the museum its distinction when it finally opened in 1983 after more than 20 years of debate. Installed in one of the museum's four buildings, the Dar al-Athar al- Islamiyyah, or House of Islamic Antiquities, presented a selection of Islamic art from the Sabah collection dating from the seventh century. While Sheik Nasser continued to collect, his wife became director of the collection.
One week before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, "Islamic Art and Patronage: Treasures from Kuwait," an exhibition comprising 120 works from the Sabah collection, opened at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia. Sheika Hussah (like her husband, she is known here by her title and first name), who had attended the opening of the show, was trapped outside Kuwait.
"The Iraqis went straight to the museum," she recalled. "They arrived at 7 a.m., and the person there was a man who had arrived early for work. He was held there for three days. They asked him to open the glass cases, but he didn't have the keys. Eventually, of course, they got into the cases."
With their collection suddenly reduced to the 120 works at the Hermitage, Sheik Nasser and Sheika Hussah decided to present "Islamic Art and Patronage" as a symbol of occupied Kuwait's spiritual freedom. They arranged for it to travel to the United States, and to this day it continues to tour the world as evidence that there is more to Kuwait than oil. The show is currently in Auckland, New Zealand.
When Sheika Hussah returned here, she saw the results of the occupation. "They only burned the two museum buildings that were occupied," she said. "They wanted to efface evidence of their crime."
The Iraqis' disrespect for Kuwaiti culture was no less apparent, she said, in the way they placed tanks inside archaeological excavation sites on Kuwait's Failaka Island, where traces of Sumerian, Hellenistic and Byzantine civilizations have been found.
While the museum awaited restoration, the Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, or the D.A.I., as it is known here, resumed its active program of lectures by visiting Islamic experts and courses in Islamic art at the so-called Maidan Center on the grounds of the Adbullah al Salem School, which also has a theater. In a country with little artistic tradition, the D.A.I. was once again at the heart of Kuwaiti cultural life.
In 2001, Sheik Nasser and Sheika Hussah, who both belong to Kuwait's ruling family, organized a still more original traveling exhibition, "Treasury of the World: Jeweled Arts of India in the Age of the Mughals," which opened at the British Museum and was later seen at the Metropolitan Museum in New York as well as in Cleveland, Houston and St. Louis. The catalog includes a photograph of a large emerald inscribed with a verse from the Koran, which is among the pieces that have been missing since 1991.
Still mourning and still hopeful of recovering this and other lost objects, D.A.I.'s newsletter has a regular column highlighting one of the stolen treasures, which include a stunning 18th century Mughal, or Mogul, bowl and saucer made of rock crystal, inlaid with gold and set with rubies, sapphires and emeralds. "If anyone knows anything about this piece or any other missing pieces, please contact us," the column routinely appeals.
But with auction houses, Interpol and art recovery agencies all alerted to these works of art, the presumption is that they have long since disappeared into private collections and are unlikely to be traded publicly again. Still, Sheik Nasser continues to add to his collection, while Sheika Hussah has moved her office back to the museum in the hope that the Sabah collection can soon return there.
The Kuwaiti government, which owns the museum, appears not to share her sense of urgency. "You have to remember that in 1991 we were like Iraq today, our infrastructure destroyed, no hospitals, no schools," Sheika Hussah said. Then she added softly: "The reconstruction has lingered for too long. Unfortunately, there is no enthusiasm here."