IT IS not every day that you get a phone call announcing the discovery of a long-lost Baroque masterpiece, even if you are the director of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. When Alexander Kader, Sotheby’s head of European sculpture, rang Timothy Potts, the boss of the Getty, in March, saying he might have found Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s first marble carving of a pope, Mr Potts booked himself on a plane to London.

“Bernini was the master of the ‘speaking likeness’,” he says. “He found a way of breathing life into marble, of capturing the essence of a person. Not just the physical likeness of the pope, but his personality and stature, his benevolent seriousness and living presence. It makes you go weak at the knees when you see it, even if you know nothing of the artist.”

Pope Paul V’s nephew, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, commissioned the sculpture shortly after the pope’s death in 1621. On its completion it was displayed in Villa Borghese alongside another famous Bernini bust of the cardinal himself. In 1893, when the family fell on hard times, it was sold at auction in Rome, having first been photographed for the catalogue. Along with this snapshot, the bust was also known by a bronze version now in the National Gallery of Denmark and through the original records of its commission.

In 1916 the sculpture was written up by an art historian, Antonio Muñoz, who claimed it was in a private collection in Vienna. Then the trail disappears. When the Getty put on its first major exhibition of Bernini sculpture in 2008, the Paul V bust was represented only by the photograph of 1893.

It turns out, though, that despite the vicissitudes of the second world war and the advent of communism, the bust had survived in perfect condition in Bratislava, not an hour’s drive from Vienna. A Slovakian artist, Ernest Zemtak, kept it in his home. In 2014, a decade after he died, his heirs sold it at auction in the city, though with the lesser attribution, “after Bernini”. Bought by a private collector with a good eye and a connection to Sotheby’s, it was soon brought to London where Mr Kader put it on a shelf in his office. “You stand eye to eye with him, and all you can do is look at the detail. The representation of the face is so lifelike: the wrinkles around the eyes, the last little bit of carving on the hair or the moustache made with the lightest touch of the chisel. No one but Bernini could have done that.”

The Getty, having bought it privately through Sotheby’s, put it in pride of place on June 18th, not in the sculpture gallery on the ground floor, but upstairs, surrounded by the museum’s great Baroque paintings: Guercino’s portrait of Pope Paul’s successor, Gregory XV, and Anthony van Dyck’s portrait of Agostino Pallavicini. The pieces were all completed within two or three years of each other, visual proof of the height of Rome’s Baroque moment.