The Trial (without result) of former Getty curator Marion True has been covered here many times before. The book “Chasing Aphrodite” aims to retell some of this story, as well as the background to it.

From:
New York Review of Books

What Went Wrong at the Getty
June 23, 2011
Hugh Eakin

Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum
by Jason Felch and Ralph Frammolino
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 375 pp., $28.00

1.

On August 5, 70 BC, at 1:30 in the afternoon, a remarkable criminal trial began in Rome. A young prosecutor named Marcus Tullius Cicero was accusing a senior Roman political official, Gaius Verres, of extortion and misrule during Verres’s tenure as governor of Sicily. “For three long years he so thoroughly despoiled and pillaged the province that its restoration to its previous state is out of the question,” Cicero proclaimed in his bold opening statement.
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In the parliamentary debate leading up to the British Government’s acquisition of the Parthenon Marbles, the Society of Dilettanti gave various accounts. Their evidence though shows that what people then thought of as Greek sculpture was something quite different to the real thing, which they had trouble identifying.

From:
New York Review of Books

Volume 56, Number 8 · May 14, 2009
A Silly, Very Cultured Club
By Ingrid D. Rowland
Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England
by Bruce Redford

J. Paul Getty Museum/Getty Research Institute, 220 pp., $49.95

Bruce Redford’s Dilettanti is not itself a dilettantish work, for the book’s succinctness and lightness of touch reflect skill of the highest order. Still, there is an evident link between Redford’s fine-tuned scholarship and the sense of sheer delight (Italian diletto ) that gave its name to the Society of Dilettanti, devoted to the study of ancient Greek and Roman art, when it was formed in 1734. That link is distilled in the motto of this peculiarly English gentlemen’s club, Seria Ludo; the paradoxical Latin phrase meant that in their playfulness, ludo, they also addressed serious matters, seria.[1]
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Now that James Cuno has contributed to two books trying to justify retention of cultural property, the New York Review of books has looked at both of these publications together.

From:
New York Review of Books

Volume 56, Number 8 · May 14, 2009
Who Should Own the World’s Antiquities?
By Hugh Eakin
Who Owns Antiquity? Museums and the Battle Over Our Ancient Heritage
by James Cuno

Princeton University Press, 228 pp., $24.95
Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities
edited by James Cuno
Princeton University Press, 220 pp.. $24.95

See the related article, The Affair of the Chinese Bronze Heads.

1.

Last June, the directors of the leading art museums of the United States agreed to limit their acquisitions of antiquities to works that have left their “country of probable modern discovery” before 1970, or that were exported legally after that date. On the face of it, the decision, issued by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), did no more than update guidelines for ancient art—one of a number of such policy refinements by the association in recent years. In fact, however, it announced a tectonic shift in museum thinking about collecting art and artifacts of the distant past, a change that was unimaginable even five years ago.
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