J Paul Getty

In a move sure to please all who crave details from lifestyles of the rich and tax-exempt, the J. Paul Getty Trust has followed through on its pledge in June to add a boatload of public disclosures to its website. The new transparency, Getty spokesman Ron Hartwig said, is part of several reforms adopted by the trust's leaders in the last year. Last summer, the state attorney general opened a probe, now near completion, of the trust's spending practices under then-President Barry Munitz.

The J. Paul Getty Trust agreed Monday to return two antiquities that Greek authorities say were taken illegally from their country. The move to repatriate a 4th century BC inscribed tombstone and a 5th century BC marble relief, both on display at the Getty Villa, comes two months after museum director Michael Brand visited Athens and promised to address a decade-old request by the Greek government for the return of four disputed objects in the Getty's collection.

Former J. Paul Getty Trust chief Barry Munitz agreed to pay retired Getty board Chairman David Gardner nearly $300,000 to write a coffee-table book after Gardner left the foundation's board in 2004. Gardner was hired to write the book just months after he intervened on Munitz's behalf to help the chief executive secure a five-year contract rather than the one-year extension some board members favored.

The J. Paul Getty Museum has agreed in principle to return some of the four antiquities Greek authorities have claimed were illegally removed from that country, and will continue negotiations over the remaining pieces. In a meeting in Athens with Greek cultural officials Tuesday morning, the Getty's new director, Michael Brand, said he would recommend that the museum return an unspecified number of the contested objects "in the near future."

The director of the J. Paul Getty Museum will meet with Greek culture officials in Athens May 16 to discuss demands that the Getty return four allegedly looted antiquities. The visit by museum Director Michael Brand, announced Wednesday by the J. Paul Getty Trust, comes as Greek authorities step up a criminal investigation aimed at securing the return of four Getty objects, including a 2,500-year-old solid gold funerary crown considered to be one of the museum's antiquities masterpieces.

NO matter if Herakles has fallen off your holiday card list. Never mind if you don't know an alabastron from a loutrophoros. Odds are you will soon find yourself at the Getty Villa on the edge of Malibu, maybe trailing a loved one, maybe squiring out-of-towners. After an eight-year closure for renovation and litigation, the villa finally reopens Saturday. But where do you start? Here's what you need to know. First, Herakles is dead, so no worries there.

Building it down to code Robert Langdon Jr., designer of the Getty Villa, died in 2004. But long before he did, he told The Times in a 1981 interview that the villa had been his toughest project. Construction required 33 permits, he said, and the long reflecting pool in the outer peristyle area had to be dug "exactly 17 7/8 inches deep. If it had been one-eighth of an inch deeper, it would have required a chain-link fence around it and a lifeguard."

IT was 1973, and eccentric billionaire Jean Paul Getty was planning an ambitious folly for his property in the Palisades: a precise replica of Villa dei Papiri, a grand home destroyed in Herculaneum in AD 79, that would house his collection of Greek and Roman antiquities. He hired the architectural firm of Langdon Wilson to create the villa, and noted landscape architects Emmet Wemple and Denis Kurutz to design the 64 acres around it.

A COUPLE of months ago, I submitted my application to become the interim director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. I suggested a tenure of just 18 months because all I had in mind was reforming its troubled antiquities division. I thought I knew how to do it because I've been a bad boy and a good boy in the antiquities game.

In a long-running legal battle with broad implications for museum collections worldwide, a senior curator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles has been indicted here on criminal charges involving the acquisition of precious antiquities in this archeologically rich country, authorities in Rome said. Marion True, 56, curator for antiquities at the museum and director of the Getty Villa, is accused of criminal conspiracy to receive stolen goods and illicit receipt of archeological items.