Rome Trial of Ex-Getty Curator Ends
ROME — The case against Marion True, the former curator of antiquities at the J.Paul Getty Museum, ended abruptly on Wednesday, after a court here ruled that the statute of limitations on her alleged crimes — receiving artifacts stolen from Italy and conspiring to deal in them — had expired.
The trial had dragged on intermittently for five years. Numerous witnesses testified for the prosecution, which argued that Ms. True knowingly bought ancient artifacts of dubious provenance for the collection of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The trial was widely believed to be the first instance of a museum curator facing criminal charges for such alleged crimes....
“The case invited scrutiny into what had been collecting practices that were not unusual in the American museum world of the 1980s and 1990s,” Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, said in a telephone interview from New York.
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The trial had dragged on intermittently for five years. Numerous witnesses testified for the prosecution, which argued that Ms. True knowingly bought ancient artifacts of dubious provenance for the collection of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The trial was widely believed to be the first instance of a museum curator facing criminal charges for such alleged crimes....
“The case invited scrutiny into what had been collecting practices that were not unusual in the American museum world of the 1980s and 1990s,” Maxwell L. Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the former president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, said in a telephone interview from New York.