Michelangelo (1475-1564) probably made the statue when he was about 20 and, according to Brandt, 'a brilliant young artist, still finding his way.' Met curator James Draper says, 'You see passages that remind you of the early Michelangelo.' Draper had glimpsed the sculpture from a bus in the mid-1980s and thought it might be the one pictured in a 1902 London auction catalog, where it was attributed to Michelangelo. If Charlton Heston doesn't turn out to have chiseled it, the statue will be only the second bona fide Michelangelo uncovered in this century, and the only one in America. Met director Philippe de Montebello, his curators of European sculpture and painting, and the head of Italian Renaissance art at London's National Gallery have lined up with Brandt on the attribution to Michelangelo. Such thoroughness is the reason 'it's a rare art historian who would want to contradict her,' says Jack Wasserman, Temple University professor emeritus. She spent the next few months researching documents and studying Jayson's photos to confirm her intuition. Goodness, what could have reduced a sophisticated professor to such schoolgirl tremors? She felt she was in the presence of a Michelangelo or, at the least, 'an important sculpture of the 15th century, very probably by him,' as she put it last week.īrandt rushed back the next day with one of her graduate students, Seth Jayson, a camera and a raft of high-powered lights. 'I felt like the Little Match Girl.' Brandt could see the subtle shadows of delicately carved muscles, exquisitely rendered curls of hair, and the way the strap of a curious quiver cut into the youth's flesh.

'I pressed my nose against the glass,' says Brandt. A three-foot statue of Cupid, which had stood for 90 years atop an interior courtyard fountain, looked strangely different. On this night, there was a party going on in the usually dark mansion, built in 1906 for the Payne Whitney family by architect Stanford White. Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt passed the French Embassy's cultural center on Fifth Avenue, near the Metropolitan Museum of Art. ONE EVENING LAST FALL, ON HER daily walk home from New York's Institute of Fine Arts, Dr.

Miracle on 5th avenue