Why Did A Sculpture Buried For 1500 Years Leave Michelangelo Speechless?

[00:00:00]The sculpture you are looking at right now was pulled out of the ground on January 14, 1506. And within hours of its discovery, it had already changed the course of Western art. A man and his two sons are being crushed by sea serpents. The father, Laocoön, >> [music] >> a Trojan priest, strains against the coils wrapped around his body, his torso twisting, every muscle visible and at the point of maximum exertion. His sons writhe beside him, their smaller bodies caught in the same trap, their faces showing different stages of the same terror. The serpents move through all three figures simultaneously, connecting them in a single continuous composition of suffering that has no clear beginning and no clear end. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder described this sculpture in the 1st century AD as the most amazing work of art he had ever seen, superior to any painting, superior to any other sculpture in existence. He said it stood in the palace of the Emperor Titus and was carved from a single block of marble by three Greek sculptors whose names he recorded. He wrote about it as if anyone reading his words would know exactly what he was referring to, as if it needed no further description because everyone already knew it. And then, it disappeared. For nearly 1,500 years it sat in the ground beneath a Roman vineyard, buried under the collapse of an empire, while the world above it changed completely. When it finally came back up, Michelangelo was standing at the edge of the hole watching. And the first thing everyone noticed, before they had finished brushing the dirt off the marble, was that the right arm of the central figure was missing. That missing arm would cause one of the longest and most consequential arguments in the history of art. And Michelangelo, who lost the argument, would turn out to have been right all along. Look at Laocoön's right arm, the one raised above the figure, bent at the elbow, the hand reaching back toward the serpent coiled around his body. That arm is the original. It was not always there.

[00:02:05]For 400 years, the arm attached to the sculpture was a different arm entirely, straighter, more extended, [music] reaching outward in a gesture of dramatic appeal, rather than the backward reach of someone trying to tear a serpent off their own back. And the story [music] of how the wrong arm stayed on this sculpture for four centuries, how the right arm was found in a builder's yard and ignored for 50 years, and how Michelangelo turned out to have been correct about something everyone else dismissed, is one of the most extraordinary stories of being right [music] too early in the history of art. When the sculpture was excavated in 1506, >> [music] >> the right arm of the central figure was missing entirely. Pope Julius II, who purchased the sculpture immediately and moved it to the Vatican, organized an informal competition among the artists of Rome >> [music] >> to determine what the missing arm should look like. The question was impossible to answer definitively, since nobody alive had seen the original. The arm had been gone for at least 1,500 years before anyone thought to replace it.

[00:03:08]Michelangelo submitted a proposal. He believed the arm should be bent backward over the shoulder, reaching back toward the serpent in a gesture of a man trying physically to pull the creature off his own body.

[00:03:21]It was the arm of someone still fighting, still active, still engaged in a struggle they have not yet lost.

[00:03:27]Raphael disagreed. Raphael believed the arm should be extended outward and upward, a dramatic gesture of appeal or supplication, the arm of someone acknowledging the scale of what is happening to them. The competition was judged, and Raphael's preference won.

[00:03:46]Jacopo Sansovino's version of the outstretched arm was attached to the sculpture, >> [music] >> and in 1532, it was replaced by an even straighter version made by Giovanni Antonio Montorsoli.

[00:03:58]That arm stayed on the Laocoön for the next [music] 400 years.

[00:04:03]Everyone who wrote about the sculpture, everyone who drew it, >> [music] >> everyone who studied it as the supreme example of ancient sculptural achievement, was looking at an arm that was not there originally. And Michelangelo, who had lost the competition and been overruled by Raphael, was so certain he was right that he painted his proof into the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

[00:04:25]In the Last Judgment, completed decades after the Laocoön competition, the figure of Christ raises his right arm in a gesture that bends backward over his shoulder in exactly the position Michelangelo had proposed for Laocoön.

[00:04:40]He did not let it go.

[00:04:42]He incorporated his rejected proposal into the most important fresco commission of his career as a permanent record that he believed the other version was wrong. To understand the sculpture, you need to understand the story it is telling, and why that story was considered one of the most morally significant in ancient Greek and Roman literature.

[00:05:02]Laocoön was a priest of Troy, the city that became the target of the Greeks after Paris abducted Helen. For 10 years, the Greeks besieged Troy without success, and finally they constructed a massive wooden horse, filled it with soldiers, and left it outside the city gates as a supposed gift before sailing away. The Trojans debated what to do.

[00:05:23]Some wanted to burn it. Some wanted to bring it inside. Laocoön stood in front of the crowd and told them not to trust it. He threw a spear at the horse's side. He said the words that have echoed through Western literature for two and a half thousand years, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." He was right, but his warning came too late, or was did believed strongly enough, or was actively undermined by a Greek spy who convinced the Trojans the horse was sacred. The goddess Athena, who supported the Greeks, sent two enormous sea serpents from the water to silence Laocoön and destroy his credibility.

[00:06:02]They killed his sons first, then turned on him. Troy accepted the horse.

[00:06:07]The soldiers inside it emerged at night and opened the gates. Troy burned.

[00:06:12][music] What the sculpture shows is not simply a man and his sons dying. It is a man who told the truth, who was right about everything, who did everything within his power to prevent a catastrophe, and who was destroyed by forces beyond human control anyway. The three figures in their moment of maximum agony are not the punishment of the guilty. They are the punishment of the righteous, which is a very different subject and a much harder one for art to address honestly.

[00:06:40]If you want more art deep dives like this one, please like and subscribe to my channel, and if you think I missed something in the painting, don't forget to comment down below. I read every single one. In 1906, an archaeologist and art dealer named Ludwig Pollak was walking through a builder's yard in Rome, a few hundred meters from the site of the original excavation, when he noticed a fragment of marble arm lying among the construction materials. He recognized what he was looking at.

[00:07:06]He picked it up, examined it, and delivered it to the Vatican Museums with his assessment that it was the missing right arm of the Laocoön. The Vatican thanked him and put it in storage.

[00:07:17]It stayed there for 51 years, not because anyone examined it and decided it was not genuine. It simply sat in a storeroom while the sculpture it belonged to stood in the Vatican Museums with the wrong arm attached, being studied and drawn and written about by generations of scholars who were looking at something that Michelangelo had known was incorrect 400 years earlier.

[00:07:40]In 1957, a Vatican curator finally decided to take Pollack's arm out of storage and compare it properly to the sculpture. The fit was confirmed.

[00:07:49]>> [music] >> The arm bent backward exactly as Michelangelo had proposed. The marble matched. The Montorsoli arm was removed after 425 years on the sculpture, and Pollack's arm, the original arm, the arm that had been lying in a builder's yard until someone who knew what he was looking at happened to walk past, was attached in its place. The Montorsoli arm, the wrong arm that everyone had studied and accepted and made the basis of their understanding of the sculpture for over four centuries, may be stored behind the sculpture today. Some accounts say it sits there, just out of sight, the monument to a competition that Michelangelo lost, but was right to lose because the right answer was not available to anyone in 1506, and the answer that won was at least a reasonable guess at a question that could not yet be answered. The impact of the Laocoön's rediscovery on the art that followed it is almost impossible to overstate. Michelangelo's figures after 1506, the prisoners emerging from their blocks of marble, the ignudi on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the figures in the Last Judgment, all show the same quality of muscular tension at the moment of maximum exertion that defines the Laocoön. The way a body looks when every muscle is engaged simultaneously, when physical effort and emotional agony are expressed through the same straining forms, is something Michelangelo had studied in anatomy and in the antique world, but seeing the Laocoön come out of the ground gave him the ancient authority for what he was already inclined to do. The same influence flows through Bernini two generations later.

[00:09:26]The coiled, twisting figures of his early sculptures, Pluto's muscles straining under Persephone's weight, the physical engagement with a body in extreme experience, all of it reaches back to the afternoon in January when Michelangelo stood at the edge of a hole in a Roman vineyard and watched [music] three figures emerge from the earth. The Laocoon is not simply a great sculpture.

[00:09:48]It is the sculpture that told the Renaissance what great sculpture looked like and the Renaissance built much of what followed on that foundation. The Laocoon and his sons stands today in the Vatican Museums in the octagonal courtyard of the Belvedere where Julius II originally placed it in 1506 and where it has stood for over 500 years with only the brief interruption of Napoleon's theft of it in 1799 and its return after his defeat in 1815.

[00:10:19]It is one of the most visited sculptures in the world. The arm that Michelangelo proposed and lost is the arm that is attached to it today. The arm that everyone accepted and studied and wrote about for four centuries is either stored behind the statue or in a Vatican storeroom, depending on which account you read. Pollock, who found the original in a builder's yard and delivered it to the Vatican in 1906, did not live to see it attached. He was killed in Auschwitz in 1943, 51 years after delivering the arm and 14 years before it was finally recognized and used.

[00:10:55]Thanks for sticking around to the end.

[00:10:57]If you want more videos like this one, please subscribe to my channel and if you think I have missed something in the painting, don't forget to comment down below. I read >> [music] >> every single one. See you in the next video.