Getty’s Signature Artifact May Have Been Looted

A 2,400-year-old statue of the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, that has become the centerpiece of the J. Paul Getty Museum’s antiquities collection may have been looted, reports the Los Angeles Times in an investigative article.

Sources in the Times article say the marble and limestone statue, which stands 7½ feet tall, was looted in the late 1970s from an area in Sicily famed for its illicit antiquities trade and then taken to Switzerland in a carrot truck.

Getty officials had defended the statue’s acquisition, saying the museum bought it from a Swiss collector whose family had had possession of the statue since 1939. The museum paid $18-million for the statue in 1988. More recently, however, the museum has expressed doubts about its origin, and it is planning its own study of the statue’s history to determine its fate, the paper reports.

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