Maybe Michelangelo: Is living room painting a masterpiece?
TONAWANDA, N.Y. — 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 (48-by-64-centimetre) 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.”