Vienna's salts of the earth

Benvenuto Cellini's golden salt cellar has been returned to Kunsthistorishes Museum.

Vienna at this time of the year is cold and snowy but this does not cloak the artistic energy apparent everywhere, particularly because the city is celebrating the return of one of its greatest treasures.

A few years ago a golden salt cellar was stolen from the immense Kunsthistorishes Museum. This was no ordinary salt cellar. It was the only surviving work in gold by the Italian goldsmith of genius, Benvenuto Cellini, who was also an outstanding sculptor. He was also a brawler and, at least once, a killer.

His autobiography, dictated when he was under house arrest, tells more about the nature of the Renaissance in Italy than a dozen textbooks. He made the salt cellar for the King of France. It is a large work featuring beautifully sculpted figures of the gods of the earth and sea in gold. Its ebony base runs on balls to roll about the table of the king. It was one of the world's greatest examples of applied art.

It was astonishing that it could be stolen from a museum as famous and well guarded as the Kunsthistorishes but the thief turned out to be an expert in alarms. He kept the piece under his bed for years but buried it in a wood where it was found when he confessed to the police.

The great fear was that it might have been stolen and melted down for the gold. The joy was finding it intact.

The other big celebration is of the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth and the musician's face is on posters everywhere as the city stages a multiplicity of events.

But on the many kiosks and billboards another extraordinary image scoops the mild image of Mozart. It is an enlargement of a wiry, vigorous self-portrait drawing by Egon Schiele. He was controversial throughout his short life but the immensity of his talent is recognised now as being at least equal to Vienna's other turn-of the century painter, Gustav Klimt.

Formerly it was one of Klimt's paintings - the famous Judith - that dominated the billboards but at present Vienna is mourning the loss from its art galleries of several paintings by Klimt that the courts have awarded to descendants of the original Jewish owners, now resident in California.

The advertisements gracing the Ring, the road that encircles inner Vienna, are for an immense exhibition of Egon Schiele's work at the Albertina. This museum was created as a splendid re-working of a palace to contain the celebrated collection of drawings and engravings formerly largely inaccessible except to scholars.

It is famous for its collections of drawings by Old Masters such as Durer and Rubens but Schiele stands at the beginning of modern Expressionism. He was charged with making pornography and is something much more radical.

More than 200 of Schiele's works on paper have been assembled. The first part of the show features his self-portraits, notable for a sharp, vigorous line that captures the boniness of the body with great emphasis on long, bony fingers.

The drawings are never comfortable. Schiele sees himself in the mirror as intense, haunted, and introspective to the point of neurosis. Sometimes he is just a hacked torso with no arms or legs. He is prepared to show himself masturbating.

This extraordinary frankness, which amounts to confrontation and a refusal to be confined by convention, extends to his huge output of female nudes. His sister was a fashion model and he drew her as an explicit nude, emphasising that she was thin to the point of anorexia, so the bones of her long arms and narrow shoulders show through the skin.

The obsession with genitals touched with bright red throughout this part of the exhibition makes some of the conservative Austrians shudder and move on quickly. One such drawing is soon to be auctioned at Christie's and is expected to make something over £1.5 million ($3.84 million).

The artist got into trouble when he was living in the provincial town of Neulengbach because he spent much time drawing street kids, often in dramatic poses. After a traumatic three-week investigation he was sentenced to three days in jail and the magistrate ordered some of his drawings burned.

The show features several touching drawings of his prison cell. Later his career was interrupted by military service in World War I.

The exhibition makes several things clear. First, that Schiele had a talent amounting to genius in handling line and areas of bright colour.

Second, that he owed an enormous debt to his mentor, Gustav Klimt. Some of the show's finest drawings are close to Klimt in manner.

It is also evident that Schiele was moving away from his self-absorption, allied to a desire to shock, towards something with wider significance and to work on a larger, more-considered scale. Partly this may have been as a result of his marriage to Edith Harms, a Viennese who contributed stability to the wild, gifted artist.

The bitter thing is that the pandemic of the Spanish influenza that swept Europe in 1918 carried off first his wife then, three days later, the artist. He was 28.