Let's start in the basement, not any old basement, and certainly not your basement or mine. Let's start in the basement of Manchester's Currier Museum of Art, where artworks are stored, sometimes for years, without anyone looking at them or thinking about them.

And then someone wonders what's down there and goes and finds out.

In the spring of 2003, that someone was Kurt Sundstrom, the associate curator and the museum's resident expert on the art of Renaissance and Baroque Europe. He went down to look for something specific: a low-relief sculpture by Antonio Rossellino, an Italian sculptor of the early Renaissance.

Although Rossellino is not a household name like Michelangelo, his work is masterful. He was born Antonio Gamberelli in Settignano, near Florence, in 1427 or 1428. Rossellino means "Little Red," apparently a reference to the sculptor's hair color. He was the youngest of five brothers, all of whom made careers in the arts.

Mainly on the strength of his busts and tomb monuments, Rossellino was, for a time, Florence's leading marble sculptor. Little is known about his life, but some sources attribute his death, probably in 1479, to the plague.

Sundstrom had heard the Currier owned a Rossellino relief, but he had never seen it. One day, he went looking.

The museum's basement is cluttered and antiseptic. Artworks stand along walls or in corners or rest on shelves. Shiny insulation tubing coils across the ceiling, making the rooms seem more claustrophobic than they otherwise might.

On one shelf, Sundstrom found the old painted relief lying on its back. It was dirty and damaged. The wood-eating larvae of the common furniture beetle had chewed holes in its frame. The paint was peeling in some places. The heavy stucco panel depicting a Madonna and Child was loose in the frame.

Still, Sundstrom was excited.

"I was stunned by how beautiful it was," he said, remembering the moment. "The condition was rough, but there was something special about it."

But why was it in the basement? There were two possibilities: its damaged condition and the possibility that it was a fake.

A short paper trail

Sundstrom is 43 years old, stands 6-foot-5 and wears glasses with round frames. He lives in Concord with his wife, Jody, a psychologist. They moved to New Hampshire just more than a decade ago when she was offered a job. A year later, the Currier hired Sundstrom, who had done his doctoral dissertation on Italian Renaissance art.

To Sundstrom's trained eye, the frame on the relief he found in the basement looked original to the piece, a rarity for works of the early Renaissance. There were also signs that the relief might have been a shrine. Old metal supports at the top of the frame might once have held a curtain rod. Burn marks on the corners below could mean its early owners illuminated the Madonna and Child with candles.

From the Currier's records, Sundstrom learned that the museum had purchased the relief in 1941 from a New York gallery. The gallery had bought it five years earlier from the estate of Robert W. DeForest, a wealthy New York corporate lawyer, patron of charities and long-time president and benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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