In 2003 a thief climbed construction scaffolding at Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum, smashed a window, and made off with a 60 million dollar masterpiece while guards dismissed the alarm as a glitch. He did not sell it. He sealed it in a lead box and buried it in an Austrian forest. This episode uses that heist as a lens on Benvenuto Cellini's only surviving gold sculpture, the Saliera, drawing on art history journals, Vienna police and museum archives, and Cellini's own boastful autobiography.

We trace the wax-model technique he learned from Caradosso, the salt cellar design first pitched to Cardinal d'Este and later sold to King Francis I for 1,000 scudi, and the hand-hammered repoussé gold work of a five-person multinational workshop that finished the piece in 1543. Then we decode the object itself: Neptune and Tellus with legs intertwi ...