Now that Italy owns the Euphronios krater, the question is whether the country can keep it. For aside from all the questions of cultural patrimony and the like, it’s far from clear whether state ownership is the best way to protect art, and Italy is a case in point. Even while it has been aggressively pursuing the Met’s krater and prosecuting the former curator Los Angeles’s Getty Museum, Marion True, major antiquities that are already in Italy are falling into disrepair as the government fails to provide adequate funding for their upkeep.

In December, according to one report in Newsweek, Italy had to cut off access to one of Nero’s palaces, the Domus Aurea, because the government had allowed a water leak to go on so long that it threatened the building’s structural soundness. Meantime on the Palatine Hill, a poorly maintained 10-yard section of an ancient wall recently slid into the ancient Forum. The ancient Baths of Caracalla may also have to close soon, after the government has slashed its arts and architecture preservation budget 35% from 2005 to 2006.

That news is bad, but it isn’t exactly new in the world of Italian antiquities. Italian authorities have been bumbling at key cultural and historical sites for years. For decades, the Italian government squandered Pompeii, one of the most important Roman archaeological sites in the world. Weeds destroyed paving stones and ancient artworks that were left exposed to the elements. An on-site museum was robbed in 1975, when thieves made off with coins and jewelry, leading to the removal of other portable artifacts to a more secure museum in Naples. Absent easily transportable objects, thieves resorted to ripping frescoes off the walls in 1977. Conditions have improved somewhat over the past decade, but experts still point to the site as a trouble spot.

Prime Minister Berlusconi deserves credit for his fiscal hawkishness, but his culture ministry’s cut-backs in the face of broader budget constraints highlight how government isn’t necessarily the best vehicle for protecting vital pieces of cultural heritage. There are plenty of other examples. No one knows how many archaeological treasures China might have drowned under its new Three Gorges Dam. In a recent article for the New York Review of Books about cultural patrimony, one of Princeton’s most brilliant professors, Kwame Anthony Appiah, recounts how the Taliban in Afghanistan wrecked priceless antiquities with mallets.

Contrast that with a long line of private collectors who have lovingly acquired and preserved artworks of many varieties. Collections by wealthy individuals, such as Claribel and Etta Cone and Paul Mellon, formed the foundation of some of America’s most important museums, like the Baltimore Museum of Art and the National Gallery. The museums at the heart of the current controversy themselves exist as a result of private collecting: The Getty in Los Angeles is built on the collection of J. Paul Getty, while the Met was formed by uniting three private collections in 1870. Museums themselves can, like governments, face financial pressures, making wealthy individual collectors the most reliable bedrock of art preservation.

In many cases the great private collections consist of paintings or other works the ownership of which is easier to trace than is the case with antiquities. And in the world of antiquities, unlike that of Impressionist paintings or Louis XV chairs, archaeological context – where on the globe it is found and what’s in the ground next to it – sometimes matters as much as the beauty of the object itself. Yet to the extent that private collectors haven’t always been the best guardians of that sort of archaeological interest, it’s because patrimony laws themselves create a disincentive.

Feature, say, an Italian developer who discovers that his building site conceals antiquities; he currently has every incentive to keep building without alerting anyone else to his find. Otherwise, the government will swoop in and perform an excavation lasting from three to five years at the end of which the government will confiscate the antiquities and the developer will just have a lengthy construction delay to show for his troubles. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of sites, not to mention objects, are lost to Italy’s “patrimony” law. Things might be different if developers could profit from selling on the private market objects they discovered.

Conserving the Euphronios krater will presumably be a less complicated task than preserving an expansive first century imperial palace, so there’s not necessarily reason to fear that the krater is in jeopardy once it lands on the Italian soil. But this one bowl has managed to cast a spotlight on broader issues of cultural patrimony and who is best equipped to preserve it. The answer, notwithstanding protests of the pro-government curatorial classes, is a resounding “It depends.” It could conceivably be a government or major museum, but the record so far favors the private individual. Mr. de Montebello’s deal means that we New Yorkers will likely, come 2008, lose a glorious piece of the civilization we share with the rest of the Western world, but all of us will lose even more if this episode sparks a backlash against the private dealers and collectors who cherished and preserved so much art for so long.