Co-Geeking

The sculpture of the death Laocoon and his sons is one of the mot famous works of ancient art. Carved from several pieces of marble that were fitted together with metal pins, it represents a dramatic moment from the legends of the Trojan War. When the Greeks carried out their ruse, pretending to withdraw from Troy but leaving behind a giant wooden horse, the Trojans were skeptical. While some Trojans wanted to bring the horse within their walls, the priest Laocoon warned the Trojans not to trust the Greeks. The god Poseidon, who favored the Greeks, sent a serpent from the sea to kill Laocoon and his sons, which convinced the Trojans to reject Laocoon’s advice and bring the horse behind their walls, unwittingly sealing their city’s doom.

This marble statue, depicting that dramatic mythological moment, has a dramatic history of its own. It was found in pieces in the soil of an Italian vineyard in 1506 and quickly gained attention. One of the first people to see it was the artist Michelangelo. Classical scholars noted that the Roman author Pliny had described with admiration a similar statue of Laocoon, and believed that this work was the very one that had impressed Pliny. The fragments were acquired by Pope Julius II for display in the Vatican palace. Several of the major artistic names of the Italian Renaissance worked on restoring the fragments and carving replacements for parts that were missing, among them not only Michelangelo but Raphael and Bramante.

In some ways, the Laocoon was the perfect sculpture for time in which it was discovered. Interest in relics of Greco-Roman art was growing, and the rich and powerful were starting to regard the acquisition and display of antiquities as a useful mark of status. Among those antiquities, large-scale marble sculpture was the most highly prized. The belief that the Laocoon statue was the very same one that Pliny had praised conferred upon it a special aura of authenticity. It was not just any ancient statue, but an ancient statue with a known origin and history, whose quality was vouched for by one of the great names of Roman literature.

At the same time, while the authentic antiquity of the sculpture was crucial to its value as a collector’s prize, it was also particularly suited to contemporary tastes. The fine delineation of the figures’ musculature in a pose of high emotional drama was perfectly adapted to the interests of artists of the Italian Renaissance. Even though it was a product of pagan Rome, the subject and its execution had resonances for a Christian audience. The agony of Laocoon’s body in a moment of divine intervention made a parallel to the agony of Jesus on the cross. The slithering serpent attending on a moment of fateful choice echoed the tale of Adam and Eve. For a Christian pontiff who was also a powerful political figure and a connoisseur of Classical art, it is hard to imagine a more perfect sculpture.

(The sculpture was so perfect for Julius, in fact, that one scholar has suggested that it was not an actual ancient sculpture but a forgery by Michelangelo himself. The evidence for this idea is weak, however, and it has not found wide acceptance among scholars.)

Yet, as perfectly adapted as the Laocoon sculpture was to the time in which it was discovered, times change, and the sculpture has changed with them. Since the Pope’s artists first reassembled the sculpture pieces and created their own replacements for the missing parts, the Laocoon has not remained the same. Over the past five centuries, artists and restorers have repeatedly gone back to the sculpture and changed it, readjusting the positions and postures of the figures, creating new replacements, and treating the surface. The position and postures of the two smaller figures has been changed. The angle of the main figure’s arm has been revised. Traces of paint were cleaned away to make the marble gleaming white. The Laocoon that we can see today in the Vatican Museums is, in important ways, not the same sculpture that came out of the vineyard soil in 1506.

Whenever we look at an artifact from the past, we must bear in mind that what we are seeing is usually not what the object originally looked like. The Laocoon statue is perhaps an extreme case, given how much attention it has garnered since it was first excavated, but we always remake relics of history to better fit what we in the present think the past should look like. Julius and his artists wanted a complete and glorious masterpiece of Classical art, so they made one out of the pieces from the vineyard. Today we want an instructive and historically accurate piece of sculpture, so we have removed many of the replacement pieces carved by the pope’s artists and rearranged the original pieces in ways that we think are more authentic. Yet since long before 1506, no one has seen what the Laocoon sculpture originally looked like, and no one in the future ever will.

Thoughts for writers

Just as Michelangelo and his fellow sculptors reimagined a relic of the past, whenever we look to the past to inspire our writing, we are always creating our own version of it for our own needs. However much we may seek and value historical accuracy, we are telling stories in and for our own times; they will always reflect what we believe and value about ourselves. This is a strength of fiction and fantasy, not a weakness. The important thing is to be thoughtful and purposeful about how we use and reimagine history when we look to it for inspiration and not let our unexamined, unthinking biases shape how we understand it.

Image: Laocoon and his sons, photograph by Wilfredo Rafael Rodriguez Hernandez via Wikimedia (found at Rome, currently Pio Clementino Museum, Vatican; 1st c. BCE-1st c. CE; marble; believed to be by Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus of Rhodes)

History for Writers looks at how history can be a fiction writer’s most useful tool, from worldbuilding to dialogue.