February 2, 2006
Met Sending Vase to Italy, Ending 30-Year Dispute
By RANDY KENNEDY

Reversing its position of more than 30 years, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
announced today that it would relinquish ownership of a 2,500-year-old Greek
vase, one of the finest in the world, to the Italian government, which has
long contended that the vase was stolen from an Etruscan tomb and smuggled
from the country.

In documents delivered today by the Met's lawyers in Rome, the museum
pledged to return the vase and 19 other disputed antiquities after weeks of
negotiations with Italy, which will now consider the offer. Under the
proposal, the vase, 15 pieces of Sicilian silver and four other ancient
vessels would be returned to Italy in exchange for long-term loans of other
prized antiquities, and the Met would assert that the objects were all
acquired in good faith.

The vase - known as a krater, once used to mix wine and water - was painted
by Euphronios, considered the greatest of Greek vase painters. When the Met
bought it in 1972 for more than $1 million from a dealer whose practices
were already under scrutiny, its appearance stunned the art world, and Italy
almost immediately began an investigation with help in the United States
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Over the years, the case - of its kind, perhaps second only to the dispute
between Greece and Great Britain over the Elgin marbles - became emblematic
of the ethical questions surrounding the acquisition of ancient art by major
museums.

In recent years, the Italian government has begun pursuing antiquities cases
more aggressively, and in 2002 it indicted Marion True, the antiquities
curator of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, on charges of
trafficking in looted objects. Ms. True, who resigned last year, is now on
trial, along with Robert Hecht, the American dealer who sold the Euphronios
krater and the silver objects to the Met.

The Italians also began to focus on objects in the Met's collection that it
believed had been looted, and Italy later issued subpoenas for information
from the Met. Last February, the Met requested a meeting with Italian
officials and in November, Philippe de Montebello, the museum's director,
met in Rome with Rocco Buttiglione, Italy's cultural minister, to hammer out
the outlines of a deal. It remains unclear when the Euphronios vase and the
other objects would return to Italy under the Met's proposal.

http://www.nytimes.com/

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