It did not take long before troubles surfaced. Mr. Frel, the curator, had been removed from his post a year earlier, when the Getty discovered that, among other things, he had participated in a tax scam to inflate the value of archeological material donated to the museum. He had also recommended that the museum buy expensive objects, like the so-called Skopas head, which turned out to be fake.

But it was only after Mr. Frel had been dismissed and the kouros had been bought that Arthur Houghton, the acting curator of antiquities before Ms. True's appointment, raised questions about the provenance papers for the kouros. Mr. Frel was known by the Getty to have fabricated provenances for other purchases. (Since leaving the museum and moving to Rome, he has made no public statements; he could not be reached for comment by The Times.)

Following up on the curator's suggestion, the Getty hired an independent expert in document analysis from Germany to look at the papers, and he concluded that they were indeed fakes. For one thing, a bank account referred to in the letterhead of the 1955 Bigenwald was not opened until 1963. For another, the postal code on the Langlotz letter dated 1952 did not exist until 20 years later.

But forged provenance papers still did not mean that the kouros was fake. After all, documents are forged for genuine artifacts that have been smuggled. Before it bought the kouros, the museum had checked with the Greek Government to make sure that the country had no record of the work as stolen. The Getty decided that the fake documents were not reason enough to ask Mr. Becchina, the Basel dealer who had sold the kouros, to take back the sculpture. (Attempts by The Times to reach Mr. Becchina were unsuccessful.)

Then last April, an independent scholar in London, Jeffrey Spier, was shown a photograph of a fake torso of a kouros, belonging to a Basel dealer (not Mr. Becchina), that looked similar to the Getty's sculpture. Mr. Spier was told that the two works had been made in the same workshop in Rome during the early 1980's, and that they had been carved from the same block of marble. He contacted Ms. True at the Getty and together they went to Switzerland. A sample of the torso was taken for testing, and in late May the results came back: like the kouros, the torso was made of Thasian dolomitic marble.

The coincidence was amazing, and the museum, to its credit, moved swiftly to buy the fake torso. If the kouros was fake, the Getty wanted to make sure that this key piece of evidence would not be lost or destroyed. The museum also wanted to compare the sculptures more closely.