PACIFIC PALISADES, Calif. The museum's opulent marble walls come from the same Mediterranean sites that once supplied the builders of antiquity. The grounds are painstakingly planted with 50 different Roman herbs. And the new pathways give visitors the impression of passing through layers of archaeological strata. Yet, rather than impressing the governments of the Mediterranean lands to which it pays such elaborate tribute, the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., has roused their anger. Saying that the villa's galleries are full of antiquities that were illegally removed from their historical settings, Italy and Greece are demanding the return of dozens of objects. On May 16, Michael Brand, the new director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which runs the villa, is expected to meet the full force of the Greek government's arguments in a session with the minister of culture, Georgios A. Voulgarakis, in Athens. Yet in a recent interview at the Getty Museum, he seemed unperturbed. "It is a matter of not panicking and thinking the Getty Museum has a crisis," he said, "but of approaching it calmly and rationally and trying to work toward a solution." The Greeks have laid claim to four objects in the Getty's collection, including a prized gold funerary wreath that graces the cover of the museum's antiquities catalog. They have opened a broad investigation of the family of a Greek dealer who did business with the Getty for many years. And the Italian government wants 52 artifacts returned. The claims by Greece and Italy have been no small headache for Mr. Brand, who inherited the problem along with a legacy of management turmoil when he took over as director at the beginning of the year. The previous director, Deborah Gribbon, had resigned 15 months earlier, citing serious differences with Barry Munitz, the chief executive of the Getty Trust; Mr. Munitz was under public scrutiny for his lavish expense-account spending, and he resigned barely a month after Mr. Brand assumed his post. "You could say it has been a challenging four months," Mr. Brand, previously the director of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, said dryly. One of his first tasks was reopening the villa in late January after a 275 million expansion and renovation, normally an occasion for a big celebration. But the mastermind behind the remade villa Marion True, the Getty's former antiquities curator was on trial in Rome on charges of trafficking in antiquities looted from Italian soil. Mr. Brand himself missed the opening because of a meeting with officials in Rome to discuss the Italian claim. Yet Mr. Brand, 48, a quiet Australian native with a Harvard Ph.D., seems cool under fire. He expressed a firm commitment to "do the right thing" about the disputed antiquities and said that opening a dialogue with the Italian and Greek governments had been a top priority. He noted that the Getty had returned several pieces to Italy in the past and suggested that it was prepared to return other objects even important pieces on display in the galleries if necessary. "You have to be a little dispassionate about it," he said. Yet Mr. Brand was equally adamant about the need to make a thorough independent review of the claims and not to be pushed to meet what he called "artificial deadlines." At the Rome meeting, Italian officials presented the Getty with evidence to support their claims, and in recent weeks they have begun to show impatience that the Getty has not yet made a formal response. Meanwhile, in a heralded pact, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York agreed in February to relinquish title to 21 objects that Italy asserts were looted. In exchange the Met is promised special long-term loans. While stressing that the Getty's staff and lawyers are nearing the end of their review of Italy's claims and that he is moving forward with Greece, Mr. Brand offered no timetable for a reply to either country. "These are very complex issues," he said. "When you look at our list of 52 objects from Italy, there are a whole range of situations." One of the disputed objects, he said, is a stone torso of a young woman, a kore, that has been claimed by both Greece and Italy. (The Getty's own catalog identifies the statue as probably coming from the Greek island Paros.) Another is a portrait head that some scholars think is a fake. And even in cases in which the evidence appears to be clear, he said, there are complicating factors. Much of the evidence consists of photographs of looted objects seized from the archive of Giacomo Medici a dealer who was convicted in 2004 of antiquities trafficking in Italy that match objects at the Getty. Documents show that Mr. Medici was in contact with Ms. True, the former curator, and passed on a number of illicit works to the Getty. But in the case of an Etruscan terra-cotta antefix, or roof ornament, installed on the ground floor of the Getty Villa, Mr. Brand said that a photograph seized from Mr. Medici was only a partial match. The photograph shows the bottom half of the antefix that is now in the museum, yet is paired with a different top half that was never acquired by the Getty. The Getty's top half does not appear in any of the photographs. "So what do you do?" Mr. Brand asked. "Break it apart again and send them half?" Adding to the complications, the Getty continues to finance Ms. True's defense team in the Rome trial, and any move on the Getty's part whether conciliatory or defensive could affect the outcome of the case. "One of the frustrations about Marion's trial is that while I want to talk about things openly and pursue innovative solutions, it is very hard to talk when you have a colleague, an ex-colleague, on trial in a foreign country," Mr. Brand said. Even so, Mr. Brand went out of his way to praise Ms. True, characterizing her direction of the villa reinstallation as brilliant and visionary. He called her abrupt resignation from the Getty last fall a tragedy. He also defended the contributions of the former Getty trustee Barbara Fleischman and her husband, Lawrence, who died in 1997. Their antiquities collection and its acquisition by the Getty in 1996 have been at the center of the case against Ms. True. Getty officials make no apologies for having assembled their collection with the help of private collectors, from material on the open market that often lacks archaeological information. Visitors to the villa are constantly reminded of the contributions of Ms. True and the Fleischmans, in whose honor a new outdoor amphitheater has been named. "We've always approached the pieces in the collection as works of art," said Karol Wight, acting curator of antiquities and former assistant curator to Ms. True, during a tour of the villa. "We're not an archaeological museum." That philosophy is evident at the villa, where about 1,200 Greek, Roman, and Etruscan works, often of exceptional beauty, have been immaculately arranged in uncluttered galleries. The emphasis is not on specific sites, but on the overlapping histories of ancient Greece, Etruria and Rome. Viewers are encouraged to study thematic connections across mediums and civilizations in galleries devoted, for example, to "Women and Children in Antiquity," "Athletes and Competition" and "Dionysus and the Theater." A room labeled "Stories of the Trojan War" includes copies of the Iliad and the Odyssey, so viewers can read the passages depicted on the artworks in question. For a museum that has only just opened as a stand-alone antiquities center, the quality and quantity of objects demanded back by Greece and Italy could seem deeply threatening. On a recent visit a reporter was able to identify in almost every gallery objects that appear on the Italian and Greek lists, ranging from a small stone statue of Tyche, the goddess of fortune, to a pair of remarkable red-figure Attic vases with scenes of athletes, to a painting-size fragment of a Pompeian fresco. Among the works sought by Italy is a marble ceremonial basin, or lekanis, depicting in color and surviving examples of painted stone are a rarity a scene from the Iliad. Ms. Wight described it as "the only piece of its kind." The Greek and Italian claims have lent ammunition to archaeologists who say that the Getty's collecting practices are an incentive to looters and have erased the archaeological context of countless artifacts. Mr. Brand counters that by bringing a bit of ancient Rome and Greece to Southern California, the Getty has performed a great service to the public and to scholars. "I think if you look at Marion and at the Getty Museum, I don't think you could ever accuse us of not using objects to good ends," he said.