conservationist working with the Victorious Youth, who was known for his specialty in ancient bronzes. Past efforts to remove encrustation from the Bronze left various scratches in the metal. The Victorious Youth took three months to clean. First, the statue went into an artificial humidity chamber, exposing bronze disease. The disease occurs when chlorides and salts in the bronze react with moisture producing discolored spots. If left untreated, the copper part of bronze can easily fall off, leaving a disfigured image. Specialists neutralize the active corrosion by submerging it in a heated solution of sodium sesquicarbonate. The Victorious Youth is placed in a vacuum with the solution to penetrate interior layers without washing anything out. This process repeats itself twice and is finalized with one last artificial humidity test to check if the bronze disease resurfaces. A humid environment under 35% is necessary to keep the statue from deteriorating. Provenance The Bronze was originally owned in 1971, by the Artemis Consortium, an association of several international art dealers, and then stored with a Munich art dealer, Heinz Herzer. The Getty Museum is involved in a controversy regarding proper title to some of the artwork in its collection. The Museum's previous curator of antiquities, Marion True, was indicted in Italy in 2005 along with Robert E. Hecht on criminal charges relating to trafficking in stolen antiquities. The primary evidence in the case came from the 1995 raid of a Geneva, Switzerland warehouse which had contained a fortune in stolen artifacts. Italian art dealer Giacomo Medici was eventually arrested in 1997; his operation was thought to be "one of the largest and most sophisticated antiquities networks in the world, responsible for illegally digging up and spiriting away thousands of top-drawer pieces and passing them on to the most elite end of the international art market". In a letter to the J. Paul Getty Trust on December 18, 2006, True stated that she is being made to "carry the burden" for practices that were known, approved, and condoned by the Getty's Board of Directors. True is currently under investigation by Greek authorities over the acquisition of a 2,500-year-old funerary wreath. On November 20, 2006, the Director of the museum, Michael Brand, announced that twenty-six disputed pieces were to be returned to Italy, but not the Victorious Youth, for which the judicial procedure was still pending at the time. In an interview to the