Met Sending Vase to Italy, Ending 30-Year Dispute

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 in Rome today by the Met's lawyers, the museum pledged to return the vase and 19 other disputed antiquities, after weeks of negotiations, to Italy, which will now consider the offer. Under the proposal, the vase, 15 pieces of Sicilian silver and four ancient vessels would be returned to Italy in exchange for long-term loans of other prized antiquities, and the Met would bear no responsibility for the objects' illegal origins, asserting that the museum acquired them in good faith.

It is unclear when the vase or the other objects would leave the Met. The museum has proposed to keep some of the objects on long-term loan from the Italians and return others as early as 2008. Under the plan, for example, half the silver collection could be returned while the other half remains at the Met, with an exchange every four years.

Philippe de Montebello, the museum's director, said that a timetable for all the objects would be negotiated in the coming weeks but that he expected the basics of the proposal to be accepted by Italy.

"We're wordsmithing," he said. "That's the stage at where we are."

"Basically things are on the way to a resolution," he said.

Italian officials today welcomed the Met's overture, which generally followed the Italians' own proposed plan, sent to the museum last month. But the officials said that there were differences to be ironed out.

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 led to front-page headlines about its provenance. 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 they 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, Mr. de Montebello met in Rome with Rocco Buttiglione, Italy's cultural minister, to hammer out the outlines of a deal.

At the time, Mr. de Montebello insisted that the museum would consider returning objects only if Italy could provide "incontrovertible" evidence that the objects were illegally taken from the country. Italy argued that it is nearly impossible to prove forensically that ancient artifacts have been looted. Today, Mr. de Montebello conceded that the standard of evidence he had demanded was unrealistic in such cases.

"I am not a lawyer and the wording 'incontrovertible' that I used, it has been brought to my attention that even in a murder cases it is not used," he said, adding that evidence sent by the Italians in recent weeks had satisfied him that there was a "substantial or highly probable" chance that objects were illegally removed.

"If there's a preponderance of evidence that points that way, then obviously we take appropriate action," he said.