Oct 112010
In short: a painting found in a Buffalo, NY, home had a long family history of being a Michelangelo. Finally someone came and tested it (including X-Rays) and determined that it very well could be.
Upshot: Values discussed range up to $300 million.
3 Responses to “This NEVER happens to me”
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Things to watch out for…the person who thinks it’s real has a book coming out on it.
Right there, the chances of it being real drop to around one in a thousand, as we enter Shroud Of Turin/Priory Of Zion territory.
It sure doesn’t look like a Michelangelo; it looks like something one would buy in Rome from a street vendor telling you it’s a lost masterpiece.
Scott, you need to be a Roman Catholic with identifiable connections with the Old Country.
Pat, it might be sold in Juarez with the same pedigree.
If there were something valuable in my family, my brother’s wife would claim it’s hers so she could sell it for cash at the first opportunity.
Actually I was going to say Tijuana, but it’s a cut above Tijuana, so maybe Juarez is closer to the truth. 🙂
I’ve been digging around for info on the art expert who’s writing the book about it. This isn’t the first time he’s found a lost Michelangelo piece of art… last time around it was a small bronze statue of Pope Julian II.
I’m not saying the painting is a fake, but when Antonio Forcellino isn’t writing books about Rennasance artists, he does restorations of Rennasance art – so he would know exactly how to do something like this in a way that would fool all but the very best of art experts.
Caveat emptor on this one even more than most antiquities that unexpectedly show up. The historical story of how it moved from Renaissance Italy to behind a couch needs a lot of critical study in detail.
The thing that hits me is that it’s _too_ Michelangelo…all the expected elements of his work are there, but in a form where they just don’t seem to fit together into one cohesive whole, but rather like they were grabbed piecemeal from other paintings by him and stuck together into some sort of artistic composite.