Was the Vatican's Laocoön a Michelangelo forgery? Some scholars still ask
Dug up in Rome in 1506, the marble Laocoön has been called Western art's defining image of agony: a Trojan priest and his two sons writhing in serpent coils. Pliny praised a Laocoön carved from one block. The Vatican's has at least seven pieces, which fuels a stubborn theory about young Michelangelo.
The group stands just over 2 metres tall and shows the priest with his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus as snakes bite and crush them. Its suffering offers no redemption, unlike Christian martyr scenes. The father's brows bulge so violently that the nineteenth-century physiologist Guillaume Duchenne de Boulogne judged the expression physically impossible. It now stands in the Museo Pio-Clementino, part of the Vatican Museums.
Pliny the Elder, Rome's chief art writer, described a Laocoön in the palace of Titus, emperor between 79 and 81 AD, and credited it to three Rhodian sculptors, Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus. He gave no date. Proposed dates range from 200 BC to the 70s AD, with the Julio-Claudian era now favoured. Many experts see the trio as copyists of a bronze from Pergamon, since the style matches the Hellenistic baroque of the Pergamon Altar, whose giant Alcyoneus strikes an almost identical pose.
The myth itself shifts with the teller. Homer never mentions Laocoön. In Virgil's Aeneid he is Poseidon's priest, killed with both sons for spearing the Trojan Horse, so he dies for being right. In a lost tragedy by Sophocles he is Apollo's priest who broke a vow of celibacy, and only the boys die, leaving him to grieve. The composition may even leave room for the elder son to escape, as in one Greek version.
Doubts persist. At least four other ancient Laocoön sculptures surfaced in sixteenth-century Rome, and in the 1550s antiquarian Benedetto Egio believed one of them was Pliny's true original. Vasari records that Michelangelo once faked an antique Sleeping Cupid, and scholar Lynn Catterson has pointed to the seven-block construction, Michelangelo's surplus marble purchases and unexplained bank deposits. The priest also lacks the usual sacrificial pose. None of this is settled, and the forgery idea remains part of a live academic debate.
Source: Laocoön and His Sons
