ART experts have dismissed claims that a privately owned wooden statuette of Christ is the work of Michelangelo.

The piece, which would be worth a fortune if it had indeed been made by the Renaissance master, went on show at the Horne Museum in Florence on Saturday and will be displayed until July.

Giancarlo Gentilini, an Italian art historian, said that he had first noticed the 41cm (16in) statuette in a private collection in Turin 15 years ago and had thought “long and hard” about it before concluding that it was an unknown work by the young Michelangelo. He has outlined his theories in a book entitled Proposta per Michelangelo Giovane (A Proposal for the Young Michelangelo).

Professor Gentilini said that Michelangelo had created the work in 1495 at the age of 20. The Italian daily newspaper Corriere della Sera suggested that the reattribution would “change the history of art in Florence at the time of Savonarola”. But James Beck, Professor of Art History at Columbia University and one of the world’s foremost experts on Renaissance art, doubted that the attribution would stand the test of time. “Every year or two there seems to be a discovery of a new Caravaggio or a new Michelangelo,” he said.

Professor Beck, who heads ArtWatch International, which monitors art restorations, said that the size of the statuette alone made it highly unlikely that it was the work of Michelangelo, as did the fact that it was carved in wood.

“At the time of the supposed creation of this work Michelangelo only worked in Carrara marble,” he said. “Even more disastrous is the awkward proportions of the statuette: the tiny head, the thick torso and the long, heavy legs.” William Wallace, Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St Louis and a leading authority on Michelangelo, also expressed strong doubts. The author of Michelangelo: the Complete Sculpture, Painting and Architecture said that the market value of “new” Michelangelos was so astronomically high that “one has been discovered every few years since 1900”. Most were wrongly reattributed.

Professor Gentilini, who teaches art history at the University of Perugia, has backing from two other Italian scholars, Luciano Bellosi of the University of Siena and Umberto Baldini of the University of Florence, who is also the director of the Horne Museum.

The professors said that, according to Ascanio Condivi, a 16th-century biographer of Michelangelo, monks at the Priory of Santo Spirito in Florence allowed the youthful Michelangelo to study anatomy by secretly attending the dissection of corpses at night. According to Condivi, Michelangelo gave the monks a wooden crucifix by way of thanks, accounting for the “anatomical accuracy ” of the disputed statuette.

Professor Beck admitted that there was a similarity to a much larger wooden Crucifixion at the Santo Spirito, said to to have been carved by Michelangelo in 1492-93. “But I do not believe that that Crucifixion is by Michelangelo either. I think it was by a later Mannerist follower, and I date it to the 1520s.”

He said that he was reminded of the presentation a decade ago in New York of a “little plaster David” which was said to have been a preparatory model for Michelangelo’s great statue of David, now in the Accademia Gallery in Florence, but which turned out to be “a worthless flea market object”.

The Horne Museum, housed in a 15th-century Florentine palace, was created by the 19th-century English art connoisseur Herbert Percy Horne. It contains Renaissance furniture and ceramics as well as minor works by Dosso Dossi, Pietro Lorenzetti and others.

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