No place like home: The Getty Villa puts Pompeii loan on view

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The Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s current exhibition of Roman antiquities unearthed during excavations in the vicinity of Pompeii includes a hefty array of loans from Naples’ great National Archeological Museum. The Italian museum, founded by Charles III of Spain in 1750, is home to numerous wonders, including a sizable group of bronze sculptures originally made for the Villa dei Papiri. That, of course, was the big country house buried by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD on which the late oil tycoon, J. Paul Getty, based the design of his museum on the edge of Malibu.

I’ll have a review of the LACMA show in Saturday’s paper. Meanwhile, the Getty Villa last week put on view its own long-term loan from Naples’ museum -- a bronze figure of a youth (ephebe), above, configured as a lamp-bearer. Excavated from Pompeii in 1925, the sculpture will remain on view at the Getty until March 2011.

A second bronze from Naples is now undergoing conservation at the Getty and will go on view next year. In July, the Getty Villa will also open ‘The Chimaera of Arezzo,’ the first in a series of exhibitions that will include antiquities loaned from the National Archeological Museum in Naples, as well as from a sister institution in Florence.

It looks like that deal struck between the Getty Trust and the Italian government in the wake of the scandals over looted antiquities is working out. More information on the current loan and the Getty’s future plans is here.

--Christopher Knight