Getty Official in Italy for Talks on Contested Art

On the day before the Getty Museum opens its lavishly renovated and antiquities-laden villa near Malibu, Director Michael Brand will be in Rome, meeting with Minister of Culture Rocco Buttiglione to discuss contested items in the Getty's collection.

Brand, who took the reins of the museum less than a month ago, is leading a five-person team to the gathering, which a Getty spokesman calls "the onset of a dialogue."

The Getty's team includes museum employees and Getty and outside attorneys, spokesman Ron Hartwig said. Getty Trust President Barry Munitz, to whom Brand reports, remained in Los Angeles.

Brand and company are scheduled to return Saturday, the day the villa reopens its antiquities collection to the public. The villa's galleries include 1,200 items, among them 30 pieces contested by Italy and four pieces contested by Greece. Hartwig noted that the team was prepared to stay beyond Friday if it saw a chance for significant progress.

The meeting comes amid a tense and busy week for the Getty. Apart from the reopening of the villa (where renovations cost $275 million) and Wednesday's resignation of trustee Barbara Fleischman, the museum's former antiquities curator is in the middle of a trial in Rome.

In that case, which has drawn international attention to the role of museums in the antiquities trade, Italian prosecutors accuse Marion True of conspiring to receive items looted from Italian soil. True resigned from the Getty in the fall amid revelations that she had accepted personal loans from business contacts without informing her superiors.

Brand's overtures to Rome began in mid-December, about two weeks before the director's first official workday, Jan. 2. The first move, Hartwig said, was a letter from Brand "to the [Italian] minister of culture, suggesting that he would like to get together with him to begin a discussion that would work cooperatively toward finding a solution that satisfies both sides."

In a statement prepared before his departure for Rome, Brand said: "The Getty's objective is to develop a fuller sense of all the evidence available regarding the objects in question. We want to be in a better position to continue our dialogue with the Italian government."

Many pieces contested by the Italians were included in a 1996 donation and sale that brought more than 300 items from Fleischman and her late husband, Lawrence, to the Getty. Within weeks of agreeing to hand over their antiquities collection to the Getty, the Fleischmans extended a $400,000 loan to True.