Martin Kober is convinced the painting of a dying Jesus that hung above the mantel in his upstate New York childhood home is the work of Michelangelo. Getting experts to agree remains the $300 million hurdle.
That’s the potential value of the 19-by-25-inch work that Kober’s family affectionately calls the “the Mike,” a one-time living room fixture that occasionally got dinged by a thrown tennis ball and once fell from the wall while being dusted.
Kober has for the last 15 years taken his Michelangelo suspicions to the art world and gotten a mixed bag of scholarly opinions. For now, the circa 1545 family heirloom that was given to Kober’s great-great-grandfather’s sister-in-law by a German baroness remains in an out-of-state vault while he seeks the elusive validation.
“It’s tormenting now,” said Kober, a retired commercial pilot who grew up in the Rochester suburb of Greece. “I’m nobody, I’m not connected. I don’t know if that’s it.”
The wood-panel painting depicts a dying Jesus supported by two angels in the lap of the Virgin Mary. Doubters view it as simply not good enough to be by Michelangelo or believe it’s another artist’s painted version of a much-copied Michelangelo drawing. Some question whether the then-70-year-old artist would have had time to fit the painting in between the Last Judgment fresco at the Sistine Chapel and another fresco at the Pauline Chapel.
Supporters of Kober’s claim cite written historical references and forensic evidence that includes Michelangelo’s preferred paint type, small brush strokes and mid-work changes visible by infrared testing that they say indicate an original, rather than copied, work.
“Unfortunately, the world of attribution is never a definitive affair,” said Michelangelo expert William Wallace, who is not surprised a consensus has yet to emerge. Assigning any work to a master is almost always a matter of waxing and waning scholarly opinion, he said, and pieces tend to fall in and out of favor as opinions change over time.