A crumbling, long-forgotten statue with an unusual erect phallus might be a Michelangelo. Renaissance scholars want hard evidence.

In a place of honor was a life-size marble statue of the Greek god Pan with a wicked expression, a forked beard, and an 8-inch erect penis leaning left. The cardinal, it appears, built a pillared shrine for it between two majestic cypress trees.

Over the centuries, new research has found, the Ludovisi family's attitude toward the marble god changed. A satyr with an ugly grimace and an imposing phallus? What would the neighbors think?

A sculpted fig leaf covering the uncircumcised penis was last seen in 1885. A row of hedges was planted in front of the statue, allowing it to recede out of view.

By the second half of the 20th century, the hedges were gone and a tree was planted in front of the statue. Artists and scholars continued to copy and study the works of the villa, but the statue left the public record for a century, not drawn or photographed between 1885 and 1985. Pan, the Greek god of woodlands and lust, was left to waste away behind a tree.

When Corey Brennan, a classics professor at Rutgers University, visited the property for the first time, in spring 2010, he didn't know what to do with the statue. The villa's steward at the time, Princess Rita Jenrette Boncompagni Ludovisi, had cleared away the tree a couple of years earlier and brought the sculpture back into public view.

She said the statue was created by Michelangelo Buonarroti, the Renaissance master who painted the Sistine Chapel and etched David out of marble before his 1564 death. She learned this from her husband, Nicolò, who heard it from his grandfather Francesco Boncompagni Ludovisi, whose "depth of historical information, handed down from generation to generation, always is proven to be historically correct and consistent," Princess Rita told Insider.

The statue's provenance was widely accepted by the 1830s, but a group of German scholars later in the 19th century had cast doubt on the attribution. When, in July 2022, a student of Brennan's, Hatice Köroglu Çam, said she was a Michelangelo fanatic, he turned the question over to her.

"See what you can do with it," he recalled telling her.

Çam took on the assignment with relish. Digging into the estate's archives and other historical documents, she found centuries-old private sketches of the statue and correspondences and journal entries describing it.

Over time, the elements had beaten the statue, whittling away some of its fingernails, softening its facial features, and receding the satyr's hairline. But in older sketches, those aspects are more sharply drawn.

The more Çam looked, the more she was convinced the statue was created by the master himself.

The statue is stuck outdoors amid a messy family dispute over the property

Çam's identification of the statue as a bona fide Michelangelo, argued over the past year and a half in a four-part, 28,000-word treatise on Brennan's website dedicated to the history of the Villa Ludovisi comes amid a bitter dispute over what will happen to the opulent property and all its stories.

In 1988, the villa had been passed on to Prince Nicolò Boncompagni Ludovisi, a Roman noble and the heir to the villa.

Fifteen years later, he met Jenrette, who had previously lived as a US Republican Party operative, a congressman's spouse, an author of a tell-all memoir about being the ex-wife of a congressman who cheated on her, a Harvard Business School alumna, and a real-estate mogul. At the time, the prince wanted to develop a hotel, and a mutual friend asked her to help out.

They married in 2009, and the newly named Princess Rita spent a decade and millions of dollars cataloging, cleaning, restoring, and studying the property's artwork and architecture. She brought on Brennan to help bring the villa to its former glory.

The prince left the villa to his wife in his will. But after his death in 2018, his three sons from a previous marriage disputed her ownership. A messy inheritance conflict ensued, complicated by the Italian Culture Ministry's legal control over many of its treasures. Çam got to study the Ludovisi Pan, as the sculpture is known, in July 2022, just months before the princess was evicted from the property.

To help settle the estate dispute, an Italian court ordered the property to go up for auction in January 2022, first at $546 million. The Ludovisi Pan, if it's really a Michelangelo, could be worth as much as $100 million, according to Brennan, who noted that one of the artist's drawings sold last year for $21 million. The Caravaggio mural alone, experts opined, was worth $360 million. (The princess once described the property as "a Caravaggio with a house thrown in.")

Hosted on a janky Italian government website alongside apartments and tennis courts, in need of an estimated $11 million in repairs, and with the provision that the Italian Justice Ministry could swoop in and force a sale to the Culture Ministry anyway, the villa attracted no bidders. Five more auctions, with prices successively revised downward, were also unsuccessful.

A seventh auction, with the asking price lowered to $122 million, was scheduled to begin in June. But over the summer, Princess Rita and her stepchildren came to an agreement where they'd put more money into sprucing up the villa and auction it privately. The group hopes to partner with an organization such as Sotheby's or Christie's to sell it properly.

The sale will likely still be difficult. Only a handful of prospective buyers could pay a high price for the villa and provide the necessary upkeep. Some cultural treasures within the property — like the Caravaggio — are physically immovable. And even if the Italian government doesn't ultimately purchase the property, it still has some discretion over how most of the artwork, including the Ludovisi Pan, can be moved or restored. The villa has 40,000 square feet of indoor space, but officials have refused to allow the statue to be moved indoors, where Brennan and Çam — who is now pursuing an art-history doctorate at Temple University — say it needs to be to protect it from further damage. The princess told Insider she hoped a buyer would appreciate the villa's treasures, including the Pan, newly uncovered frescoes, and what she said were the remains of Julius Caesar's estate "where he romanced Cleopatra."

"Now that all heirs have signed a rapprochement, I can only hope that someone purchases our home who appreciates all we have discovered therein, from the archive, to which I have devoted two decades of my life," she said.

The mainstream press has already accepted the Pan statue's attribution to the Renaissance master. The New Yorker described it as "a statue of Pan by Michelangelo" in 2011 without qualification. CBS News, visiting it in 2017, said it was a Michelangelo sculpture "in all his glory." Earlier this year, CNN said it was "recently unearthed" as a Michelangelo. The New York Post called it one of his "masterpieces."

Michelangelo scholars are more skeptical.

William E. Wallace, an author or editor of eight books about the Renaissance artist, viewed the statue on a Jenrette-led tour in 2015 with a group of conservationists. He told Insider the sculpture was interesting but "not a great thing." The evidence that Michelangelo created it, he said, simply isn't there.

"They're hopeful that it's a Michelangelo because it'll sell for $50 million. If it's a garden sculpture by nobody, it's $5,000," Wallace said. "So there's a big difference by putting the name like Michelangelo on it. But there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that he has anything to do with this object."

Whether further examination determines it's a Michelangelo or not, there's no question it's an important sculpture that needs further preservation and study, Brennan said.

"Either way, it's an understudied 16th-century sculpture that needs to come out of the elements," he said.

In its current state, the statue has literally lost its luster. The marble has turned dull. Apparent attempted repairs in previous years have left holes and rusting metal pieces in its face and neck. Cracks are forming on the right testicle.

"There are a lot of cracks, a lot of holes, a lot of metal pieces," Çam said. "But it has a lot of secrets. And it is melting. It's melting in front of the world."

The family was embarrassed by the phallus, Çam says

For some time, Çam found in her research, visitors to the Villa Aurora, the most prominent part of the Villa Ludovisi, assumed the statue was from ancient Rome.

The earliest reference to it in the Ludovisi archives is in a January 1633 inventory. In the early 1700s, it was cataloged alongside other statues on the property that were thousands of years, not decades, old. It left an impression on Francis Mortoft, who visited the property in 1659. "Wee saw a very ridiculous statue of A satyr, which canot but stir up any man to much laughter in looking on such a Rediculous piece, but yet very excellently well made," he wrote in his journal.

By the mid-1700s, something had changed. Visitors had generally understood that the sculpture was attributed to Michelangelo, according to records unearthed by Çam, even if they thought it wasn't his best.

Writing in his private notes in 1756, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, widely considered the founder of the field of art history, identified it as part of "the school of Michelangelo." The Swiss painter and writer Henry Fuseli believed it to predate Michelangelo, theorizing it influenced Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, visitors generally agreed Michelangelo himself created it. Çam found in her research that the exceptions were three German scholars who visited between 1836 and 1880s and considered it not a genuine Michelangelo, if "Michelangelo-esque."

The Germans didn't give reasons for their conclusion. Victor Coonin, a professor of Italian Renaissance art at Rhodes College, offered one: It doesn't have that Michelangelo je ne sais quoi.

The Ludovisi Pan is "a wonderful, delightful statue" but is "a little bit lifeless," Coonin said. In his works, Michelangelo investigated his subjects, interested in what makes them profound or beautiful, and invited the viewers of his work into that process. The Ludovisi Pan is not the work of an artist engaged in that kind of exploration, Coonin said.

"That's part of what makes Michelangelo, Michelangelo — that it's about something more than what it appears to be," Coonin said. "And this Pan looks to me rather to be what it purports to be."

The statue does not, at first glance, look like a lot of Michelangelo's other sculptures, especially the full-scale ones. They are typically religious figures in the Christian tradition; their faces look like they've been struck by a heavenly light, in poses that inspire reverence. The Ludovisi Pan stares you down with a cruel laugh, provoking you while resting at ease.

Yet, Çam said, the details are unmistakable.

Take a look at the statue's right hand, she said, which is virtually identical to the right hand on Michelangelo's sculpture of Moses, down to the veins shaped in a diamond pattern. The index and middle fingers are spaced in the same way, she wrote, and the Pan's fingers are buried into the pelt over his shoulder in the same way Moses' is buried into his tangled beard.

The Pan statue, Çam said, also resembles Michelangelo's titanic portrait of David. Each stands in almost the same pose, slightly shifting its weight on the right leg, which is supported by a marble-carved tree stump.

Most compellingly, the Ludovisi Pan appears to be not just any ordinary sculpture by Michelangelo but a self-portrait, Çam said.

She came to that conclusion while looking at other works considered to be Michelangelo's self-portraits, including a mask in his 1533 drawing "The Dream of Human Life."

"I thought maybe this is Michelangelo's self-portrait because it's almost identical," she told Insider.

Like the artist, the Pan statue has a forked beard, a full lower lip, and "a flattened and broken nose," Çam said. And in a series of illustrations of grotesque figures held in Frankfurt's Städel Museum, Michelangelo drew a faun, a half-human, half-goat beast, with a face that looks very similar to the Ludovisi Pan's.

"The depiction of the eyes, the shape of the eyebrows, and the treatment of the lower forehead between the eyebrows are the same," Çam wrote. "Significantly, the long, broken, and wide-shaped nose and wide-shaped nostrils are almost identical."

The ravages of time have made those similarities less clear. But they are striking, Çam told Insider, in early illustrations and photographs of the Pan that she discovered in the Ludovisi family's archives, made when the statue's features were in better condition.

And in a 1723 drawing by the artist Hamlet Winstanley, the figure is presented in a "near-flawless state," she wrote. The statue's potbelly once looked like abs, its smile laughing with you and not at you. That illustration, Çam said, demonstrates similarities to Michelangelo's other works and helps explain why other visitors to the Villa Aurora were so enamored with the work.

We see "the finer details of the Ludovisi Pan that have now largely disappeared," she wrote: the curls of its beard, the hairy animal pelt slung over its right shoulder, and the fur on its goatlike legs, which have become smooth over time.

If the statue is so great, and a possible Michelangelo, then why is it wasting away? Çam theorized that the phallus had something to do with it.

While it was originally covered by a fig leaf — which could be removed if an artist wanted to draw the faun fully nude — it disappeared at some point. Giuseppe Felici, a family archivist, described the statue as "repugnant and obscene" in a 1952 chronicle of the property. The Ludovisi family, Çam surmised, was embarrassed by a large, erect phallus greeting their visitors. They shuffled the statue to less-prominent places on the property and planted some shrubs in front of it.

"It was the Pan's erect phallus that negatively affected its placement and presentation — from at least the early 18th century exhibited with a fig leaf, and eventually positioned behind a tree — at different locations on the property of the Villa Ludovisi," Çam wrote.

Given how prominently the statue was once presented on the Ludovisi estate, it was odd for it to be given the short shrift centuries later, Brennan said. While other sculptures show male genitalia, the Pan is the only statue with a fully erect penis, their research found.

"There was plenty that they boasted about," Brennan told Insider. "The family was really proud of their artwork but not this piece."

That same uneasiness removed the statue from discourse among connoisseurs over whether it was created by Michelangelo, Çam said.

"The phallus is what prevented this sculpture from getting proper recognition, which in turn directly affected its attribution to Michelangelo," she wrote. "Squeamishness about subject matter overshadowed all the stylistic similarities between Michelangelo's works and Pan, derailed its scholarly acceptance, and caused the sculpture to be abandoned to its present fate."

It's hard to carve a marble statue in secret

The trouble for Çam's theories is that Michelangelo was not some obscure artist whose life and work were shrouded in mystery before his death. He was a rock star. He carved David out of marble when he was 26. He is the best-documented artist of the Renaissance.

Historians have more than 1,000 letters written by or to Michelangelo, in addition to bank records, contracts, and biographies written during his lifetime. In none of them is any reference to a self-portrait Pan obtained by the Orsini family, according to Coonin, the Rhodes College professor.

"That everybody would've ignored it or didn't know about it, that Michelangelo wouldn't have mentioned it to anyone, that nobody mentioned it as being a Michelangelo within Michelangelo's lifetime — I think that that's rather unlikely for such a large and idiosyncratic sculpture to escape complete mention in the literature," he said.

It is Michelangelo's very celebrity that explains why so many features may appear Michelangelo-esque, Wallace, a professor of art history and architecture at Washington University in St. Louis, said.

By the time of his death, many considered him the greatest artist who ever lived. He inspired legions of imitators and students of his work, perhaps including whoever made the sculpture, he said.

"That artist who probably carved that garden sculpture had seen the Moses," Wallace said. "And so when he came to carve hands and the beard, he thought to invoke the greatest master of carving of all time, and he would be praised by his contemporaries for being able to imitate Michelangelo very nicely."

As for the faces looking like Michelangelo's? Çam and Brennan conceded the Pan could be the work of an imitator — perhaps a student in an oedipal struggle with the master — though still of immense historical value. Anyone who spent months carving a big, expensive block of marble to make Michelangelo look like a beast would have shaken up the Italian art scene.

"It's either Michelangelo doing a self-portrait, or it's one of Michelangelo's contemporaries depicting Michelangelo as half goat, half man. And either option is really interesting," Brennan said. "If it's Michelangelo who is portraying himself as such, that's unbelievable. But if someone else, I can't imagine one of his followers saying, 'Oh, here, Michelangelo, I'm your assistant here, and I've created this sculpture of you as the god Pan.'"

Çam and Brennan said they believed the Pan could be one of Michelangelo's early works, from before he became famous. The statue, Çam said, reflects his interest in antiquity and mythology, even if those themes are not as developed as in his later works.

But to Wallace, the simplest explanation is the most likely.

"Everybody in Florence in the 16th century was seeing these drawings by Michelangelo, and they provided artists all kinds of ideas about how to go about carving things," Wallace said.

Besides, a life-sized marble statue is not exactly the kind of thing you can make discreetly.

"Marble is extremely heavy, expensive, it's hard to move. You need to carve it somewhere and keep it there — marble isn't carved quickly," Coonin said. "And so you'd have to have a piece of marble standing in a studio somewhere that he's working on continuously and never be seen or mentioned by anyone."

As for the family being mortified by the statue's penis? Çam simply hasn't brought enough evidence to support her theory that the Ludovisis demoted it because of its genitals, Wallace and Coonin said. Garden statues are rearranged all the time.

"Maybe they got embarrassed by the penis and so they put it out in their garden. I don't know," Wallace said. "All of this sounds very fuzzy."

'Found' Michelangelos come and go

In 1996, a sculpture of a young archer displayed in a French Embassy in Manhattan, New York, caught the eye of a young graduate student who thought it looked like the work of one of Michelangelo's contemporaries. Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, an art-history professor at New York University, took a look and thought it was made by Michelangelo himself, perhaps one of his early works. Other scholars were skeptical.

Wallace, as he does here, described it in a magazine piece at the time as "wholly unlikely." He said then, as he does now, that these "new" Michelangelos "come and go."

"On average, a new Michelangelo has appeared every two or three years for the past 75 years," he wrote in the April 1996 issue of ArtNews.

Wallace told Insider he was being "polite" those decades ago. Michelangelo creating the cupid, he said, "is still unlikely and less than likely."

He keeps a list of 200 works that have been attributed to Michelangelo since 1900. Only one — a wooden crucifix in a church in Florence, Italy — has achieved consensus as the real thing, he said.

That graduate student who spotted the archer statue, James David Draper, later got a job as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, down the block from the embassy where he first saw the statue. In 2009, France loaned it to the museum, where it remains. In its description of the sculpture, the Met elides all debate: It was "only recently it was recognized as Michelangelo's lost Cupid," the museum says. Draper estimated Michelangelo made the sculpture when he was 15 years old, an early age when the historical record is relatively murky. On a recent rainy Sunday, throngs of visitors walked around the statue. They paid more attention to the colorful porcelain works nearby, fired by anonymous artists and also once owned by storied Italian families.

How can we be sure a Michelangelo is a Michelangelo? Michael Daley, an art historian and the editor of ArtWatch UK — who has extensively argued that the $430 million "Salvator Mundi" painting is not a genuine work of Leonardo da Vinci — told Insider that these things were determined by connoisseurship. If enough Michelangelo experts say a Michelangelo is a Michelangelo, then it's a Michelangelo.

Çam didn't disagree. The visitors of the 18th century, she said, were connoisseurs. When the statue was in better shape, they believed it possessed the same divine spark that burned in Michelangelo's other works. But contemporary connoisseurs have different standards. Can the marble be traced to the quarries of Carrara, which Michelangelo prized for its quality material? Are there other documents that can help determine its ownership? Can it be traced to a time when Michelangelo was young, or to when other artists may have been imitating his style?

"The visual/stylistic case is not established for the work being an autograph Michelangelo," Daley wrote in an email. "Essentially, the weakness is that the author's photo-comparisons of details attest at best to work's Michelangelo-like features and in some instances are actually counter-productive."

Wallace said, "It's a matter of weight of opinion over time."

He added: "The weight of opinion over time usually is pretty negative. These things come out as Michelangelo and then they descend. They become followers of Michelangelo, pupils of Michelangelo, anonymous followers of Michelangelo."

The Ludovisi Pan — perhaps because it has been ravaged by the eras, perhaps because it has always looked this way — stares us down.

Its stature has shifted, but it has outlived kings and empires. Across the chasm of time, its smile has widened, turning crueler, mocking our questions.