The American dealer who sold it to the Met, Robert Hecht, said he got it from a guy in Beirut who'd kept it in a shoe box in a closet. The true provenance of the krater wasn't exactly a surprise. Next year the Met is sending it back to Italy for good. When the museum debuts its lavish new Greek and Roman galleries next month, its most notable antiquity will be left in a side gallery.

It was stolen-dug up by looters from an Etruscan tomb near Rome and smuggled out of Italy just months before it was sold, an inconvenient truth the Met finally copped to last year. Thomas Hoving, then the Met's director, was so smitten by its classic beauty he called it 'positively the finest work of art I've ever seen.' (Take that, Michelangelo.) But the 2,500-year-old krater did have one major flaw. The krater-a 12-gallon pot for mixing wine and water-was one of only two dozen surviving examples by the great painter Euphronios, and it even had his signature. In 1972, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art paid a record-smashing $1 million for an ancient Greek vase known as the Euphronios Krater.

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