Everything about the sculpture is both larger than life and hard to pin down. Thought to have once adorned the palace of the First Century AD Roman emperor Titus, the sculpture slipped from the view of history for centuries. Its appearance was only barely surmisable from the lavish praise that the Roman writer Pliny the Elder had heaped upon it in his compendium of knowledge, Natural History. Lauding it as “a work that may be looked upon as preferable to any other production of the art of painting or of [bronze] statuary”, Pliny testifies that the sculpture was “sculptured from a single block, both the main figure as well as the children, and the serpents with their marvellous folds” and that it was the work of three legendary Rhodesian sculptors Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus. What isn’t clear from Pliny’s remarks and still remains a matter of some speculation to this day is whether the sculpture he saw was an original creation or a copy, as some believe, of a long-lost masterwork.
Sculpted with care
What we do know is that Pliny’s effusive esteem for the sculpture was still echoing in the minds of those who accidentally stumbled across it buried in a vineyard in February 1506. Upon receiving news that a clutch of classical sculptures had been found, Pope Julius II dispatched a team of experts to oversee their excavation. In attendance for the careful disinterment was a young sculptor by the name of Michelangelo, who had recently completed a daring and much ballyhooed statue of David in Florence, as well as Lorenzo di Medici’s favourite architect, Giuliano da Sangallo. Also present was Giuliano’s 11-year-old son, Francesco, who would go on to become a sculptor of some note in his own right.
Recalling the legendary dig decades later, Francesco, then in his 70s, remembers being at the heart of the action. “I climbed down to where the statues were”, Francesco memorialised in a letter, “when immediately my father said, ‘That is the Laocoön, which Pliny mentions’. Then they dug the hole wider so that they could pull the statue out. As soon as it was visible everyone started to draw, all the while discoursing on ancient things…”
That the sculpture left an indelible impression, too, on the imagination of Michelangelo is evident from the Renaissance master’s subsequent sculptures. It is impossible to look at the posturing of Michelangelo’s the Dying Slave, for example, created seven years after he witnessed the recovery of Laocoön and His Sons, without marking the parallels in pose and sublimated emotion. More immediately, parallels between the muscular mannerisms of the ancient sculpture and aspects of the frescoes that Michelangelo was to design on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel just two years after Laocoön was excavated have been suggested.