“But what can I do? I cannot kill him,” lamented Wilfried Seipel, director of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, to the NY Times. He was referring to a security guard who merely turned off what he believed to be a false alarm without investigating the cause. Later Sunday morning a cleaning woman discovered that Benvenuto Cellini’s masterpiece “Saliera” had been stolen. One or more thieves had climbed up exterior scaffolding (unsuccessfully designed to thwart such audacious thievery), broken a window, and entered the building, quickly smashing a heavy display case and running off with the 10-inch-high sculpture. Shown in lectures to many an art history student, the gold-plated salt and pepper holder is the famous work of the infamous Cellini, who led an Italian Renaissance life that would stun the imagination of modern tabloid readers, and chronicled it in his autobiography. It is likely that a private collector paid dearly to have own this piece. Perhaps an enterprising underground art dealer decided the time was ripe for a bidding war in the black market. Whatever hands it ends up in or travels through, the Kunsthistorisches Museum director hopes they will take care of this fragile Renaissance artwork.