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Metropolitan Museum of Art Painting May Actually Be Michelangelo Work

By Test Reporter | April 16, 2010 5:09pm | Updated on April 16, 2010 5:28pm
A painting currently hanging at the Met may be a lost Michelangelo.
A painting currently hanging at the Met may be a lost Michelangelo.
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Flickr/peterjr1961

By Olivia Scheck

DNAinfo Reporter/Producer

MANHATTAN — A painting purchased for $150,000 by the Metropolitan Museum of Art four decades ago may turn out to be a priceless work by the Italian Renaissance artist Michelangelo, the New York Post reported.

Everett Fahy, the recently retired chairman of European Paintings for the Met, argues that the painting was done by Michelangelo in a forthcoming issue of the Italian scholarly journal Nuovi Studi.

If Fahy's theory is correct, then the piece was actually painted by Michelangelo in 1506, two years before he painted the Sistine Chapel.

The  museum acquired the painting at an auction in 1970 believing that it had been produced by Francesco Granacci, a contemporary of Michelangelo's.

Experts pegged the price of the piece at $300 million if it proves to be the work of Michelangelo, the Post reported.

"I am confident that the only artist capable of making this splendid painting was Michelangelo," Fahy said in an interview with ARTnews.

While Fahy is "one of the world's most distinguished scholars of the Italian Renaissance," his claim has not been accepted without hesitation. Keith Christiansen, Fahy's successor at the Met, refused to say whether he bought the theory, according to ARTnews.

"When you put out something like this, there's going to be a lot of naysayers," Fahy explained to the magazine. "But the people who really have good eyes in this field that I've shown the painting to, they've all agreed with me. With attributions, it's not the number of people who agree with you, it's the quality of their judgments."