Michelangelo Dolfino (Getty Images/SuperStock RM)
It’s an art mystery for the ages.
A painting of Jesus and Mary— long thought by its owners to be a Michelangelo — is for decades kept behind the sofa of a suburban New York home, hidden from public view. Then an Italian expert comes forward to provide credence to its authenticity, seemingly giving the story a happy ending and raising the possibility of a potential windfall of millions for its owner.
But as expert Antonio Forcellino’s book “The Lost Michelangelos” is released this week, others are stepping up to say the painting can’t possibly be the real deal.
“Michelangelos just don’t turn up,” says Manhattan art dealer Richard Feigen. “They were painted for kings and popes and given to princes.”
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He called the idea that the painting popped up near Rochester, “inconceivable.”
Keith Christiansen, the chairman of the European paintings department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — where the painting was said to hang briefly in 1885 — urged “extreme caution,” although he has not seen the work.
Laurence Kanter, the curator of early European art at the Yale University art gallery, said it was possible that a painting by Michelangelo could appear because “stranger things have happened.”
“I have no idea if it is at all probable,” he says.
But after viewing an image of the painting, he said it looked like a copy of one of Michelangelo’s famous drawings.
Kanter said artists of the period left no inventories of their work. “There’s no mechanical or scientific means of verifying these things,” he says. “It’s really study and judgment that’s involved.”
Forcellino, an Italian art historian and restorer, was doubtful himself when contacted about the painting by Martin Kober, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who lives in tiny Tonawanda, NY.
“It is astonishing how many people convince themselves they own a Michelangelo or a Raphael, inherited from some old aunt or picked up from a dealer in the ill-founded belief that some dealers, even antiques dealers, have less of an eye that they do,” he writes in “The Lost Michelangelos.”
Kober’s tale was of an inherited painting affectionately called “The Mike” because of his family’s belief that it was a Michelangelo, passed down from European royalty.
But what hooked Forcellino into the story was the photo e-mailed to him. It was a detail of the painting’s underdrawing highlighted by infrared reflectography — an X-ray-like examination.
Through this imaging technique, Forcellino could see that a preliminary drawing had been put down on the panel and formed the basis for the painted work.
“Even at this preparatory stage, it was extremely beautiful and particularly expressive,” he said.
Forcellino also remembered a letter written in 1546 that he had stumbled across four years earlier in the Vatican Library.
The letter was penned by Italy’s Ercole Cardinal Gonzaga, who headed the Duchy of Mantua and was a backer of church reform. The correspondence, and others from the same time, concerned a certain painting — a “Pieta,” or “pity,” a study of the Virgin Mary and Jesus — by Michelangelo that another cardinal, Reginald Pole, was offering to Gonzaga as a gift.
The use of the word “painting” was significant to Forcellino.
Vittoria Colonna, the marchesa, or noblewoman, of Pescara, a city on the Adriatic Coast, befriended Michelangelo, and he was said to have written sonnets for her, in addition to creating works of art. Colonna made references in letters to paintings by the artist, particularly a depiction of the Crucifixion. But historians had interpreted Colonna’s letters to refer to drawings, not paintings.
But here, in the 1546 missives, were prominent individuals discussing a painting of Mary mourning Jesus, not a drawing.
The painting, Forcellino believed, had been made around 1545 by Michelangelo for Colonna. She gave it to her friend Pole as he headed off to join the Council of Trent, the body charged with weighing reforms and fending off Protestantism.
“There is no doubt that Michelangelo produced at least two small devotional paintings,” Forcellino writes.
Forcellino’s quest for confirmation took him from ancient archives in Dubrovnik, Croatia, to a laboratory at the University of Buffalo. It was there, in the lab, that he saw the painting — coated with years of grime — for the first time.
“I could not help but be surprised by its smallness,” he said of the 25-by-19-inch panel.
He then viewed the images made by the reflectography exam, which showed what he called pentimenti — changes made by the artist. These changes indicated the painting was not a copy, since an artist reproducing a work would have no need to make such changes.
He was also relieved to see that the black spot masking the Madonna’s teeth was only dirt.
More distressing was hearing Kober describe how the painting had hung in his parents’ living room until it was knocked off the wall by an errant tennis ball and left behind the couch.
“It was not the fall that shocked me, but the idea that the painting had been subject, year in and year out for decades, to the central-heating vagaries of a middle-class family home,” he writes.
Forcellino sought to piece together the painting’s provenance, or ownership history. Records suggest that Cardinal Pole’s gave the work to a fellow priest, Crisostomo Calvini.
Around 1600, Calvini became archbishop of Ragusa, the city that is now Dubrovnik.
The Pieta ended up in the hands of a wealthy Ragusan family, the Gozzes, and, according to Forcellino, records indicate it was seen in the family home in 1840.
During Forcellino’s trip to the Dubrovnik state archive, he read the will of Bishop Fabio Tempestivo, who had been the archbishop of Ragusa after Calvini. While there was no mention of the painting, notations on the document show that an executor of the estate sold some of the bishop’s belongings to a member of the Gozze family.
That was the link to Kober’s family.
Countess Nicoletta Gozze, a widow of the last heir of the family, left the painting to her second husband after her death in 1847.
The husband, Augustus von Lichtenberg, remarried a German baroness, Johanna von Lilien. When von Lichtenberg died, all of his first wife’s possessions went to the state, but von Lilien managed to hang on to the painting.
The broke widow moved back to Germany and into the home of a friend of her mother. That friend, Baroness Villani, purchased the painting from her. When the baroness died, she left the work to her faithful lady-in-waiting, Gertrude Young.
Around 1885, Young sent the painting to her brother-in-law in the United States. That man, Martin Jeejer, was Kober’s great-grandfather.
When Kober retired from the Air Force in 2003, his father charged him with tracking down the painting’s history. As a commercial airline pilot, he would spend his layovers and free time scouring bookstores, galleries and museums.
Kober showed the painting to William Wallace, a professor of architecture and art history at Washington University in St. Louis, who said he believed the paint used to be from the time of the Renaissance.
“I was immediately taken that this was a very important old and impressive object,” he told The Post.
He said he is unwilling to attribute the painting to Michelangelo until he has seen it restored.
Kober stashed the painting in a vault and has said he wants to have it restored in Italy and exhibited there.
Reached this week, he deepened the mystery of the work by saying he couldn’t talk about the next step.
“I have to be very guarded about what I say,” Kober said.
An answer to whether the work is indeed a Michelangelo may not come anytime soon. Such debates are often settled by the consensus of experts over time. While a museum may hang the Pieta — perhaps with a vague authorship, like “attributed to” — it could be decades before enough people weigh in to determine whether it is or isn’t the real Mike.
Which means Kober may never see the windfall some have suggested. Not that it isn’t fun to dream. In speaking to a television crew last fall, Kober laughed when asked about the potential worth of the painting, perhaps as much as $300 million.
“If somebody wanted to buy this painting for that much they could do that right now,” he said. “I wouldn’t say no.”