By KATHRYN SHATTUCK
NY Times
Published: April 18, 2005
The sculpture "Laocoön," at the Vatican Museums, was unearthed in 1506, but a new theory says it is a forgery by Michelangelo.
A (Lynn Catterson) scholar has suggested that "Laocoön," a fabled sculpture whose unearthing in 1506 has deeply influenced thinking about the ancient Greeks and the nature of the visual arts, may well be a Renaissance forgery - possibly by Michelangelo himself.
The strikingly naturalistic sculpture, 95 1/2 inches tall, depicts a deadly attack on the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons by writhing sea snakes dispatched by Athena - or, some say, Poseidon - after Laocoön warned against admitting the Trojan horse during the siege of Troy. It resides in the Vatican Museums in Rome.
Richard Brilliant, Anna S. Garbedian emeritus professor of the humanities at Columbia and an authority on classical antiquities - his works include "My Laocoön: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks" (University of California Press, 2000) - said that Dr. Catterson's contention was "noncredible on any count."
For one thing, he said, "she made absolutely no reference to ancient sculptures that could be related to 'Laocoön,' " including a large body of ancient fragments found just before World War II at Sperlonga, a site near Rome where Tiberius had a luxurious villa, that refer specifically to episodes of the Trojan war. Some scholars have also found fault in relating the "Laocoön" to the Michelangelo drawing of a torso, now at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.
"To my eye, the Michelangelo drawing does not bear a close resemblance to the torso of the Vatican Laocoön," said Katherine E. Welch, an associate professor at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and an expert in Hellenistic and Roman imperial antiquities, in an e-mail message. "The latter is distinguished by a vigorous torsion or twist, which is lacking in the drawing."
The "Laocoön" was placed at the Vatican Museums by Pope Julius II not long after it was discovered on Jan. 14, 1506, on the Esquiline Hill. Upon hearing the news, the pope immediately dispatched the architect Giuliano da Sangallo to view it; Sangallo brought along his colleague Michelangelo Buonarroti.
As a young artist under the patronage of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Michelangelo had witnessed the Medici family's willingness to spend considerable sums on ancient Greek or Roman objects, which he would have had ample opportunity to study and perhaps try to recreate, she said. He was an astute forger who earned his Bacchus commission after a carved sleeping Cupid that he had buried in the ground to "age" had been sold to a wealthy cardinal in 1495.
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