An American former pilot, who wishes only to be identified in the press as Martin, must be breathing a sigh of relief that the tennis ball he and his brother once boisterously chucked at a painting in their childhood home — knocking it clear off the wall — didn’t inflict any lasting damage. The unfinished painting of the Virgin Mary and Christ, affectionately referred to for years as "the Mike" by Martin’s family, is now believed by Italian art historian and restorer Antonio Forcellino to actually be the work of the Renaissance master, Michelangelo, the Australian reports.

Martin was given the roughly two-foot-tall oil painting on fir panel nine years ago by his parents, and later called in Forcellino — who has worked on restorations of other Michelangelo paintings — for an attribution. Now, in his new book "La Pieta Perduta" ("The Lost Pieta"), Forcellino is declaring that the painting is an authentic 1545 work by the Renaissance master.

"The first time I saw it, I was so struck by the strength of it that I felt breathless," Forcellino told the Australian. "Only a genius could have painted this — the darkness which underscores the suffering, the Virgin who looks as if she's screaming and the figure of Christ after he has been deposed from the cross. It's small, but the technique is extraordinary."

Forcellino claims a May 1546 letter that he unearthed in a Vatican library evidences that Cardinal Reginald Pole, Henry VIIIs cousin who served later as archbishop of Canterbury, offered the pieta to Italian cardinal Ercole Gonzaga. According to the Australian, the work later fell into the hands of a baron who served as honorary Prussian consul to Croatia, next a German baroness, then her lady in waiting, one Gertrude Young, and finally Young’s brother-in-law, Martin’s great-grandfather. Now it resides in Buffalo, New York, where Forcellino traveled frequently to study it.

If Forcellino’s attribution is accurate, the pieta would be one of only four known panel paintings by Michelangelo, and an oil depiction of one of the artist's most famous sculptural subjects. (If it's not, it will probably serve to sell a few of his books anyway.) The last major Old Master discovery occurred last month, when restorers at the Prado in Spain recognized that a painting they were working on was a previously unknown work by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.