Salt and Light

In the lobby of the French cultural affairs office in New York, there is a statue. At first glance, it's a rather unimpressive work of art: a unfinished figure of Cupid, with lower legs missing, both forearms broken off, nose cracked. The statue had come with the Fifth-Avenue mansion when the French government bought it in 1952. The building's architect had picked it up somewhere in Italy, way back in 1905 he thought it was a Roman relic.

One evening in 1995, an art historian from the nearby Metropolitan Museum happened to be walking by, and glanced through the window. She had walked that sidewalk hundreds of times, without ever seeing the statue. That evening, though, was different: the embassy staff was preparing for a party. They had focused bright lights upon the statue of Cupid.

The art expert stopped and peered through the window. For the first time, she studied the little Cupid. Later she got in to see it, and ran her fingers along the chisel-marks in the marble, feeling there the trace of a master's hand. A short while later, she came out with an amazing claim: that this little Cupid is an original Michelangelo.

The art world, I'm told, is coming to recognize that she's right. It's not one of the Italian master's finest works it seems he abandoned it after making a bad mistake in the carving but if the theory is correct, it is the only Michelangelo sculpture in all of North America.

For more than a century, that little statue has stood in the lobby of that Fifth Avenue building. Yet it was only when the light shone upon it that its true importance was revealed.