In what the Post is calling "potentially the art find of the century," a Buffalo family may be in possession of an unfinished painting of Jesus and Mary done by Michelangelo. Though the Kolbers always joked about "The Mike," they didn't actually believe it was a Michelangelo until their son, Air Force Lt. Col. Martin Kober, brought historian Antonio Forcellino to see the piece. Forcellino said, "I'm absolutely convinced that is a Michelangelo painting." Too bad it spent years attracting dust in a forgotten corner of the living room!
The painting, nicknamed "The Lost Pieta," spent 27 years living behind a couch after the kids knocked it off the wall with a tennis ball, and Forcellino worried that it had "been exposed to heating commonly found inside a middle-class home." Examinations show the painting was done around 1545, and portions are unfinished, suggesting it wasn't a copy because "o patron pays in the Renaissance for an unfinished copy." The work eventually ended up in the hands of a German baroness named Villani, who willed it to her lady-in-waiting, who was a sister-in-law of Kolber's great-grandfather.
Now, the painting could be worth millions. Recently, Yale found a Velazquez painting in their basement, and said it would never leave Yale's campus. The Kolber's didn't say whether they'd be willing to sell the piece.
