ROME -- The clues are in the under layers.

The color preparation. The sophisticated palette. The tiny brush strokes and minute changes in detail.

Those are the telltale signs, according to one of Italy's most esteemed art conservators, that a painting depicting a fallen Jesus in Mary's arms and flanked by two angels -- stashed under a couch for 25 years outside Rochester and now owned by a City of Tonawanda man -- might be a genuine Michelangelo.

Such details on the 470-year-old piece of spruce wood with the rare combination of tempera (an emulsion of water and egg yolk) and oil glazing its surface "are not that of a school, but the work of a real master," said Lorenza D'Alessandro, who has been entrusted with the cleanup of the possible masterpiece.

Other clues include wax seals, receipts and handwritten thank-you notes tracing the painting back to a gift from Michelangelo to his dear friend and Roman noblewoman Vittoria Colonna.

Martin Kober, of the City of Tonawanda, has steadfastly believed the painting is a Michelangelo original dating to 1545. The painting had been in his family for many years, and he received it from his parents a few years ago.

His belief in the painting's importance is now stronger after an examination by D'Alessandro and an extensive scientific examination in Rome.

After meticulous cleaning, stratigraphic analysis and examination with infrared technology, professionals from the art community in Rome are more willing to consider the painting to be a Michelangelo.

Kober's parents had stored the painting under a couch for 25 years after getting it as a gift from the sister-in-law of Kober's great-great-grandfather. She had received it from a German baroness more than a century ago.

Due to the fame of Kober's piece, D'Alessandro was a guest at the National Gallery of Art in the Barberini Palace, where the Istituto Superiore del Restauro di Roma supervised her work and police guarded the door.

D'Alessandro applied X-ray fluorescence, reflectography and radiography analysis to clean the painting of a complex stratification of overlaid materials. She used equipment supplied by ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Development.

"The restoration of the 'Pieta of Buffalo' [was] made under strict scientific supervision of the Istituto Superiore del Restauro di Roma," stated the Rome Foundation, a philanthropic organization that supports art, health and science initiatives.

D'Alessandro said the wood panel was of such high quality and executed in such a superior way that any damage requiring her attention was caused only by previous shoddy restoration attempts and not from the paint protocol.

She also was able using dendrochronology -- dating by counting tree rings -- to determine the decade the wood panel was painted: the 1550s. Soon her team may be able to determine the exact year, which will be crucial to the Michelangelo case.

Using infrared reflectography and X-ray examinations, she got down to the original painting. Infrared reflectography is a technique used to look through paint layers; when longer wavelengths of infrared radiation penetrate paint layers, the upper layers appear transparent. Eventually, this reveals layers of a painting not visible to the naked eye, such as an under drawing.

Underneath the surface of Kober's painting, D'Alessandro discovered high-quality, precision under layers.

But during a cleaning attempt in the 1700s, the face of Jesus lost its shading, and the body became discolored.

D'Alessandro was able to return the painting to its original form, reinstating the folds in the draperies of the angels, the precise facial outline on the figure of Jesus and skin pigments that she believes only a master such as Michelangelo could have achieved.

Kober hopes forensics can help him. He says a 470-year-old fingerprint from when the paint was wet, which was found on his wood panel, matches another fingerprint found in a Pauline Chapel fresco by Michelangelo between 1538 and 1540. The fingerprint is believed to have been found during the chapel's restoration in 2004.

It could be decades before an international committee of scholars comes to a consensus about the painting's authenticity.

Still, the cleaning and display are a breakthrough for Kober, who had a hard time convincing people the painting was done by Michelangelo when he began his crusade in 2003.

Kober's assertion that it was a Michelangelo was discounted by art historians from Columbia University, the University at Buffalo and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, and by museum curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Museum in Washington. But Kober says those institutions passed judgment without having seen the piece.

"Many who have not seen it have been willing to say that it is of low quality and of no value," Kober said. "So, seeing is believing, and those that have not seen it really should not even comment on it."

Antonio Forcellino, a writer and art restorer, was one of the first people from the world of art scholarship and conservation in Italy to see the piece who believed it could be a Michelangelo. He agreed to travel to Buffalo to meet Kober and see the wood panel in 2008.

With Forcellino's support, Kober was able to attract the attention of the Rome Foundation as it prepared for one of the biggest retrospectives dedicated to Renaissance art in Rome: an exhibition titled "The Renaissance in Rome: The Inspiration of Michelangelo and Raphael."

If the painting is not directly by the hand of Michelangelo, it is by someone in his close circle, according to the curators of the exhibition, Maria Grazia Bernardini and Marco Bussagli.

Because of the painting's quality and complexity, the curators -- in corroboration with the Rome Foundation, the Central Institute of Restoration in Rome and ENEA technology -- were committed to restoring it to its original form and displaying it in the Renaissance art retrospective.

The exhibition, which runs through February, shows off more than 170 works, including Kober's painting.

The wood panel's journey from under a couch to behind glass is complemented at the exhibition by a documentary of the whole scientific operation, allowing visitors to judge for themselves.

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Theresa Potenza is a freelance writer from Amherst, now living in Rome, who earned her bachelor's and master's degrees in art history from the University at Buffalo. She is also a museum docent at the Vatican Museums.