Den of Antiquity.(Metropolitan Museum of Art's antiquities department)

In 1989, Carlos Picon, who is the curator of the Greek and Roman department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, got a telephone call from Richard Keresey, the head of the antiquities department at Sotheby's: A curious sculpture was about to come on the market. It was almost seven feet tall and depicted a feminine but muscular figure, with a striking, noseless face, standing in a relaxed posture and dressed in an abbreviated tunic and lace-up sandals. Oddly tucked under the figure's armpit, as if the statue were leaning on it, was a smaller female figure, swathed in robes and standing stiffly upright, like a self-conscious guest at a toga party. Keresey told Picon that the sculpture was being sold by a society family in Palm Beach, Florida, who had displayed it next to their swimming pool, under a canvas awning. The family thought it was a statue of Artemis, but Keresey and Picon immediately made a different identification.

"The sellers called it an Artemis because the figure has something like breasts, but I said, 'No, that is the Hope Dionysos, and it has been lost since 1917,' " Picon explained the other day, in his office at the Met. "I said it was a famous statue in antiquity." Only a year earlier, Picon had written an article for an academic journal in which he lamented the disappearance of the statue. The last known purchaser had been Francis Howard, a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, who had bought the Dionysos at Christie's in London, in 1917, when it was auctioned off as part of the famed Hope Collection. (In the late eighteenth century, Thomas Hope became an enthusiastic collector in the newly fashionable field of antiquities, purchasing recently excavated Greek vases in bulk, and filling his homes in England with ancient statuary shipped from Rome.)

Picon joined the Met in 1990, after spending four years as the curator of Western antiquities at the San Antonio Museum of Art, and the Hope Dionysos was his first acquisition. Later this month, the sculpture will be on view at the center of the Met's new Leon Levy and Shelby White Court--a grand two-story atrium that is modelled on Imperial Roman architecture and is paved with red and green marble, in a pattern that alludes to the Pantheon. (The space used to be a cafeteria.) "It is appropriate that the statue is something that used to be so famous and was completely neglected, that went out of taste and fashion," Picon said of his new centerpiece. "And it is also a great fact that it is not a statue of the Furies, of something lethal and deadly--that it is beneficial and kind."

The auspicious demeanor and distinguished provenance of the Hope Dionysos would offer aesthetic and historical satisfactions at any time, but they are particularly welcome at this moment. The renovation of the Met's Greek and Roman galleries--a fifteen-year project--has been completed at a controversial time in the world of antiquities. In the past decade, a number of high-profile court cases have centered on the illegal excavation and exportation of ancient archeological finds. Two years ago, Giacomo Medici, an international dealer whose wares made their way into private and public collections, was convicted in Italy of trafficking in antiquities dug up by tombaroli, or tomb raiders. (Medici is appealing the conviction.) In 2002, a New York jury convicted Frederick Schultz, a prominent dealer, with conspiring to receive stolen Egyptian antiquities. Five years earlier, one of Schultz's associates, a British dealer named Jonathan Tokeley, had been convicted of handling stolen objects; he had smuggled antiquities by coating them in plastic and painting them to look like garish tourist trinkets. (He was sentenced to six years in prison, after attempting suicide by swallowing hemlock.) Marion True, formerly the curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, is currently being tried in Italy for handling illegally excavated antiquities, along with Robert Hecht, an antiquities dealer now in his late eighties. (Both deny any wrongdoing.)

Meanwhile, Italian and Greek authorities have successfully applied moral suasion to American institutions. Last fall, the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston, sent thirteen objects back to Italy, including a statue of Hadrian's wife, Sabina. (According to the Italian police, photographs of the dirt-encrusted statue were found in a raid on Medici's warehouse, in Geneva.) The Met, too, has been obliged to reexamine its holdings, and last year agreed to return twenty-one items, including one of the museum's most prized possessions: a krater--a vaselike object used for mixing wine and water--depicting the death of Sarpedon, painted by the Greek artist Euphronios. Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Met, bought the krater in 1972, for an unheard-of million dollars; in his 1993 memoir, "Making the Mummies Dance," he called it "the single most perfect work of art I had ever encountered." Suspicion was cast upon the provenance of the Euphronios krater almost as soon as its purchase was announced. (Hoving jokingly, if presciently, dubbed it the "hot pot.") Italian authorities claim that Medici supplied the krater to the Met, via Hecht, and that it was illegally excavated; however, under the terms of the agreement, the Met is giving up the krater without acknowledging any wrongdoing. ("The guy who sold it to us faked us out," Hoving told me. "It is kind of a nice object. Leonardo would have loved to own it.") The Italians have permitted the Met custody of the vase until 2008; it is currently on display in a section of the Greek and Roman galleries that opened eight years ago.

The legal basis for these arrests and negotiations is a 1970 UNESCO convention in which the participating countries agreed to cooperate in efforts to curtail illicit traffic in antiquities. The United States adopted the provisions of the accord in 1983; the discovery of Medici's warehouse, in 1995, provided the Italian government with the evidence it needed to make a case on a grand scale. As a result of the Italian and Greek repatriation campaigns, museums around the world have been reconsidering their own acquisition standards: last fall, the Getty said that it would buy no undocumented antiquities ...