Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna audio guide,
five stops, free.

Gold, and not much of it. What is in the case in front of you is an object you could carry in two hands, and for nearly three years nobody knew where it was.

Benvenuto Cellini finished it in 1543 for King Francis the First of France, working up a design he had first drawn years earlier for a cardinal in Rome. He did not cast the gold in a mould. He hammered every part of it by hand. In his autobiography he records that he was paid a thousand scudi for the job.

Start with the two figures. The man with the trident is Neptune, the sea, and the small ship beside him is the salt cellar, the reason the object exists at all. Facing him is Tellus, the earth, with a little classical temple at her elbow, and that is the pepper. Around the oval base are the four winds, young men with their cheeks blown out, and the times of day, which Cellini borrowed from Michelangelo's Day, Night, Dawn and Dusk in the Medici Chapel in Florence. Under the left heel of Tellus there is a salamander. That was Francis the First's personal badge, and it stands for fire, so all four elements are present in a thing the size of a shoebox. There are bearings underneath, so a servant could roll it down a banqueting table.

This is the only work in gold by Cellini that still exists. Nearly everything else he made was melted down, and this piece came close to the same end in 1562. It reached the Habsburgs as a diplomatic gift, from Charles the Ninth of France to Archduke Ferdinand the Second of Tyrol, who had stood in as proxy at the French king's wedding.

Then, on the eleventh of May 2003, it was stolen. The building was wrapped in scaffolding for repairs at the time. The thief set off the alarms; staff took them for a fault; nobody noticed the empty case until twenty past eight in the morning. The museum offered a million euros. On the twenty-first of January 2006 it came out of the ground in a lead box buried in a forest near Zwettl, ninety kilometres north of Vienna. The thief, Robert Mang, gave himself up after the police released surveillance photographs and people who knew him recognised the face. He was sentenced to four years. The object you are looking at is insured for around sixty million dollars.

The curtain has been pulled back for you and the painter has his back turned. He is right at the beginning of the picture on his easel: all he has laid in so far is the laurel wreath on the girl's head. The trumpet, the heavy book, the blue dress, the map behind her, all of that is still ahead of him.

The girl is dressed as Clio, the muse of history. The wreath, the trumpet and the book come straight out of Cesare Ripa's handbook of personifications, a book every Dutch painter kept on the shelf.

Look at the map on the back wall. It is a real one, published by Claes Janszoon Visscher in 1636, and it shows the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands as a single country, with west at the top instead of north. By the time Vermeer painted it, that country had already come apart. Now look at the chandelier in front of it. On top sits a double-headed eagle, the badge of the Habsburg emperors who used to rule the whole of it.

Then find the signature. It is painted into the bottom border strip of the map, to the right of the girl: I Ver-Meer. There is no date anywhere on the canvas.

Vermeer would not sell this painting. He was in debt for much of his life and he kept it anyway. After his death his widow Catharina signed it over to her own mother to keep it away from creditors, and the executor of the estate, the Delft microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, ruled that the transfer was illegal. For decades afterwards it hung in Vienna under the name of Pieter de Hooch, with a forged de Hooch signature on it, until the German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen argued it back to Vermeer around 1860.

Then the twentieth century. Count Rudolf Czernin had bought it in 1813 for fifty florins. In November 1940 Adolf Hitler bought it from the family for one point eight two million Reichsmark, through his agent Hans Posse, for the museum he intended to build at Linz. It spent the end of the war underground in the salt mine at Altaussee. An American officer named Andrew Ritchie, who ran the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives programme in Austria, brought it back from Munich to Vienna by locking himself and the painting into a train compartment.

It was handed to this museum on the seventh of November 1946 and entered the collection in 1958. The Czernin family has asked for it back several times. The last refusal came from the Austrian government in 2011.

Look at the fox first. There is one, and it is thin, hanging from a spear on the middle hunter's shoulder, and it is the entire result of the day. The dogs are gaunt and their heads are down. In the snow in front of the men are the tracks of a hare that got away. This is the most reproduced winter scene in European art and it is a painting about a bad day.

Bruegel signed it in the bottom centre, BRVEGEL and then 1565 in Roman numerals. It belongs to a set of six paintings of the times of the year, made for the Antwerp banker Nicolaes Jonghelinck. Five of the six survive, and three of those are on the walls of this room: this one, The Gloomy Day and The Return of the Herd. The Hay Harvest is in Prague, at the Lobkowicz Palace, and The Harvesters is at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. So three fifths of what survives of Bruegel's year is hanging around you.

Now let your eye travel. On the left, outside the inn, several adults and a child are getting ready to singe a pig over an open fire, which is what December looks like. The sign above them has come off one of its hooks and hangs crooked. It reads Dit Is Gulden Hert, this is the Golden Hart, and the picture on it is the vision of Saint Hubertus, or of Saint Eustace: a stag with a cross in its antlers, the patron saint of hunters, presiding over three men who caught a fox.

Down in the valley the mill wheel has frozen stiff. On the ponds, silhouetted figures are skating, playing a forerunner of ice hockey called kolf, and playing eisstock, which is more or less curling. Bruegel rendered them as silhouettes, small flecks of dark on the ice.

Then look up. There are crows in the bare trees and a magpie crossing the top centre of the panel. Bruegel sometimes used both birds as an ill omen, and in Dutch folklore the magpie belongs to the Devil. And look at the horizon: jagged mountain peaks, of a kind that exist nowhere in the Low Countries.

The date matters. 1565 was the beginning of a run of savage winters that we now call the Little Ice Age, so this is not a nostalgic scene.

The picture came here the way most of this collection did. It went from Jonghelinck to the city of Antwerp, which gave it to Archduke Ernst in 1594. Ernst died the following year, it passed to Rudolf the Second, and then to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm.

It has never stopped working on people. Tarkovsky put it into Solaris in 1972, in the weightless scene, under a Bach organ prelude. Lars von Trier used it several times in Melancholia. And the art historian Martin Kemp has pointed out that probably no secular subject appears on more Christmas cards, which is a strange afterlife for three exhausted men and one dead fox.