The Agrigento Youth statue that was loaned to the Getty as part of a artefact exchange to resolve a dispute with Italy has now been returned to Italy.

From:
Getty blogs

Agrigento Youth Returns to Italy on a Pedestal—A Very High-Tech One
By Annelisa Stephan on April 15, 2011

Centuries ago, a marble sculpture known as the Agrigento Youth took a violent fall, losing his nose and parts of his arms and legs. The cause? Likely an earthquake.

The statue, loaned to us by the Museo Archeologico Regionale in Agrigento as part of our partnership with the Sicilian Ministry of Culture and Sicilian Identity, begins his journey from the Getty Villa back to Sicily at the end of this month. But this time he’ll be protected from tumbles, thanks to a high-tech mechanism concealed in his base.
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The Getty Villa’s Cult Statue of a Goddess is returning to Sicily, where it is thought to have been illegally excavated in the 1970s. This decision to return the statue follows earlier refusals when the museum previously insisted that it had acted in good faith when purchasing the sculpture. This is Sicily’s second successful artefact restitution in recent weeks, following the Morgantina Silver returned by New York’s Metropolitan Museum.

Various other artefacts (currently the sculpture of the Agrigento Youth) are being loaned to the Getty by Italy in return for the ongoing restitution programme. This is a similar arrangement to the offer that has previously been put forward by Greece to the British Museum as a proposal to enable the return of the Parthenon Sculptures.

LA Times

Getty Villa prepares to say farewell to its goddess
The museum welcomes the culture minister of Sicily, where the ancient sculpture will return, ending decades of contention over looted artworks.
By Mike Boehm, Los Angeles Times
December 7, 2010

To look at her — 71/2 feet tall atop her earthquake-resistant pedestal, her face serene, her limestone robes rippling in an unfelt wind — is not just to appreciate a pinnacle of ancient Greek statuary, but to experience a semblance of how divinity must have felt to awestruck pagans.

And now the great goddess, once described as “the greatest piece of classical sculpture in … any country outside of Greece and Great Britain,” not to mention the most costly antiquity the J. Paul Getty Trust ever acquired, is about to depart.
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