Nude Muse in Bronze from Acapulco.

It caught my eye before I knew whose hand had made it.

A bronze. A woman. The line economical and sure of itself, a confidence that does not pause to explain. I bought it. She is home now — Barbara, as I have come to think of her, Barbara F. Peart, which is what I believe she was called, and what she deserves to be called again after all this time. She is the newest piece in a collection that keeps growing and keeps surprising me, and this one surprised me twice — once for its beauty, and again for everything it asked.

She was commissioned to honor a wife. That much I knew. What I did not know — what the bronze itself could not tell me — was who the man was.

His name was Frank M. Brandstetter. Born in Transylvania in 1912. He came to the United States at sixteen and worked immigrant factory jobs until he stumbled, by accident and instinct, into the hotel business. He rose slowly through the Depression years, enlisted in the Army in 1940, and then — as the century accelerated into its worst decade — became someone remarkable.

Frank parachuted into Normandy on D-Day. He led a small party behind German lines to deliver a surrender demand from General Matthew Ridgway to Field Marshal Walther Model. He foiled a mass breakout plot by German POWs in England. General Ridgway called him a man of "unimpeachable integrity, and personal physical and moral courage to the highest degree." They called him Brandy.

After the war, Brandy took those qualities — the nerve, the eye for what mattered, the immigrant's refusal to accept a ceiling — into the business world. He found a few undeveloped casitas on a bay in Mexico and built them into Las Brisas. By 1972 it was the finest resort in the world. The Acapulco that glamour invented, the Acapulco of the American century when the bay was the Rio de Janeiro of the northern hemisphere and shared the map of pleasure with Havana — that Acapulco was, in no small part, his.

It was there, at the height of it, that he commissioned Ponzanelli to make Barbara.

The book that gave him back to me — Our Man in Acapulco, by Carlisle and Monetta — carries the subtitle Hotelier, corporate executive, and U.S. Army intelligence officer. It is the story, the authors write, of "a man of action, a great patriot who dedicated his life to the service of his country." He died at 98, in 2011.

The ordinary cruelty of objects is that they outlast the love that paid for them. I still believe that. But Brandy Brandstetter was not an ordinary man, and I find I am less interested in the cruelty now than in the gift — that a boy from Transylvania, who parachuted into France and built a paradise in Mexico, should want to cast his wife in bronze, and that the thing he chose should find its way, half a century later, to a filmmaker who cannot leave a good story alone.

The pedestal bears the signature of Octavio Ponzanelli — Adolfo Octavio Ponzanelli, born in Carrara in 1879, known simply as Octavio.

The Ponzanelli are not a man but a line, and a long one — chisels traced in Carrara to a plaque cut by a Valerio Ponzanelli around the year 1200, in the cathedral of a town that is made of stone. Carrara does not so much produce sculptors as quarry them. The marble and the men come up out of the same mountain.

Before Mexico there was Paris, where Ponzanelli is said to have studied under Auguste Rodin — a claim that Barbara in bronze does nothing to discourage. The modernist ease in the figure, the way the surface still seems to remember the thumb that shaped it, is rodiniano. He carried that hand across the Atlantic.

He came to Mexico at the turn of the century, and the architect Adamo Boari put him to work on the Teatro Nacional — the building we now call the Palacio de Bellas Artes. He sheathed its façade in marble. He worked the figures at the foot of the Columna de la Independencia, the monument every Mexican knows as the Ángel, under Enrique Alciati; the bronze lion led by a child is his. He stayed half a century, founded a marble works in the capital that outlived him, and left behind not only monuments but heirs.

Here the serendipity begins.

Because while Ponzanelli was dressing the Teatro Nacional in marble, another of my long subjects was at work on the very same building, an ocean away. Boari, hunting for a fireproof curtain worthy of his theater, had turned to New York — to Louis Comfort Tiffany. In the furnaces at Corona, Long Island, Tiffany Studios was fusing nearly a million pieces of Favrile glass into a luminous panorama of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl.

The two campaigns did not quite touch on the scaffolding. Ponzanelli's marble belonged to the Porfirian building years; Tiffany's curtain, fabricated in those same years, would not descend before an audience until 1934, after revolution and delay. But they share the building, and they share the impulse. I have written before about that glass curtain. I did not expect, when I bought a bronze in passing, to find that the man who made it had his hands on the same walls. These are the coincidences a collector lives for — and the kind of convergence a filmmaker cannot leave alone.

I went looking, and found the one serious modern study of the man: the work of Martín Checa-Artasu, professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, whose chapter on Ponzanelli — Medio siglo de escultura en México, in a volume devoted to the Italians who built modern Mexico — gives the sculptor back his outline. From it I learned the dates, the dynasty, the long second life as a maker of altars and tombs for the dioceses of the republic. It is the kind of scholarship that makes the rest of the work possible, and I am in his debt.

Most of all I want to go to the source.

In August I bring The Piccirilli Factor to Massa for the Italian premiere — the film about another family of Carrara marble, the brothers whose New York studio gave the United States much of its monumental sculpture. The symmetry is not lost on me. The Piccirilli built one adoptive nation's image of itself; the Ponzanelli built another's. Two dynasties out of the same quarry, lending their hands to republics not their own and now unimaginable without them.

After the screening I will stay. My friend Silvano Soldano, who knows this ground far better than I do, has agreed to help. We will walk the libraries and the canteras, looking for what remains of Ponzanelli.

Brandy arrived in America with nothing and built a world. Barbara has arrived at my home after half a century of silence. The circle is not yet closed — but it is closing.