A THREE-YEAR hunt for a stolen £37m Renaissance salt cellar dubbed the “Mona Lisa of sculptures” came to an end yesterday when the suspected thief led Austrian police to his buried treasure.

The world’s most expensive salt cellar, called the Saliera and crafted by Benvenuto Cellini between 1540 and 1543, was found undamaged in a wooden case in a forest outside Zwettl, the suspect’s home town 55 miles north of Vienna. Police did not identify the man, who was still being questioned. The Austrian media said he was a self-employed contractor.

The man had been captured on a surveillance camera while buying the mobile phone that was used to send a text message to police in a failed attempt to extort a ransom. Last Friday, after the picture was broadcast and he was recognised by acquaintances, the suspect walked into a police station in an effort to clear his name.

Police said he initially denied any knowledge of the theft but eventually admitted that he had buried the Saliera in the woods.

The 10in high gold and encrusted enamel sculpture of figures representing the sea and the earth was created for King Francis I of France. The small vessel designed to hold salt rests between the two figures.

Cellini boasted in his autobiography that when the king caught sight of the Saliera “he uttered a loud outcry of astonishment and could not satiate his eyes with gazing at it”.

The Florentine master’s only surviving work in gold was stolen from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum on the night of May 11, 2003. The thief, or thieves, got in via scaffolding, walked past a Raphael painting, smashed the glass display case, grabbed the salt cellar and left by the same route.

The theft, thought to have taken less than a minute, set off the alarm, but sleepy guards turned it off without checking. A cleaning lady discovered the theft four hours later.

Art experts said at the time that the illustrious work would never find a buyer, not even on the black market. Three months after the theft a letter arrived at the insurers reportedly containing porcelain powder chiselled off the Saliera and demanding €5m (about £3.4m) for its safe return. Police said on Friday that the ransom had since gone up to €10m.

Wilfried Seipel, the museum’s director, who had been criticised for lax security, yesterday described the recovery of the Saliera as “the most beautiful moment of my life”.

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