Greek, Roman – or Fabulously Fake ?

Anne Holler provides this fascinating story regarding a Vatican show piece, where things aren't all they seem to be...

Is a show piece of the Vatican collection really Michelangelo’s greatest forgery?

Call it forensic art history: part scientific method, part old-fashioned research. But one American art historian has been re-thinking a 500-year old discovery and has come up with a theory that is rocking the academic world of Renaissance art.

In January 1506, a spectacular larger-than-life-size sculpture of Laocoön and his sons was discovered in an underground chamber of a vineyard near Rome. According to Virgil’s Aeneid, it was Laocoön who warned the Trojans about accepting the Greek gift of a wooden horse. The warning went unheeded; the Trojans opened their city gates to wheel in the unexpected present and Greeks soldiers proceeded to pour out of the horse and trounce the disillusioned Trojans. As an after-thought, the vengeful Greek gods (Athena or, possibly, Poseidon) sent a nest of deadly snakes to entwine and slowly strangle Laocoön and his two young sons.

The 1506 discovery of “The Laocoön ,” a powerful depiction of the struggle between the father and his sons against the serpents, was an instant sensation. Pope Julius was particularly thrilled as he had tried to buy a similar piece a few years back when he was a cardinal. Julius immediately asked Michelangelo, a 30 year old up and coming sculptor, to take a look at the artwork and verify its antiquity. Michelangelo obliged the pope and declared the find a classical masterpiece! Adding to the drama, Michelangelo was almost certain that the piece was the very same sculpture referred to by the first century AD Roman encyclopedist, Pliny the Elder! Barely able to contain himself at this classical attribute, the pope quickly agreed to pay a staggering sum of money in installments to the vineyard owner and the classical antiquity gem was carted off for installation into the newly completed Vatican sculpture courtyard.

What’s fishy about this story?

According to Dr. Lynn Catterson, lecturer at New York’s Columbia University and specialist on Renaissance sculptors . . . plenty.

“The discovery of ‘The Laocoön,’” reasons Catterson, “has too many coincidences.”

Armed with an undergraduate degree in biology, Catterson approached the “coincidences” using the scientific method. “I put together dual hypotheses,” she says. “1) Michelangelo made a spectacular forgery and 2) The Laocoön is a forgery. It was then left for me to connect the events and actions that intersect through both hypotheses.”

Catterson, 48, wrote her Ph.D. thesis on 15th century Florentine sculptors associated with the Medici family. Within this world, she notes, the counterfeiting of antiquities was common, almost the norm. “Making fake antiquities gave the sculptors the profit margin they needed, especially in the early years of their careers.” An energetic, down-to-earth and “the-door-is always open” academic, Catterson says that she did not set out to debunk any previous research on “The Laocoön,”

“The clues were there for a long time,” she points out. “I just approached the authenticity of the statue using objective criteria rather than jumping on what has been said for ever and ever.”

When “The Laocoön” was “discovered”, Michelangelo was 30 and still struggling to gain fame, fortune and patrons. “All of his early works were fakes,” declared Catterson. “Michelangelo showed a familiar criminal pattern. He started out small and then got more daring. His forgeries just got bigger and better. “The Laocoön appears to be his masterpiece.”

As for the second hypothesis, she notes a long-standing art historical mystery. “The Laocoön” has always been problematic to art historians -- but the questions were always centered on whether the statue was Hellenistic or a Roman copy.

Shortly after purchasing the assumed antiquity, Julius was disturbed by two findings:
Pliny had written that “The Laocoön” was created by three sculptors from Rhodes and it was made from one piece of marble. The work that Julius so extravagantly paid for was in seven pieces. Pliny also recounted that the statue belonged to Emperor Titus. A farmer found “The Laocoön ” in an underground chamber which was once part of Trajan’s baths.

Catterson also notes that the statue, when discovered, was in near perfect condition with only the lower right arm missing.

The plot thickened last August, when Catterson was leafing through copies of Michelangelo drawings and she stopped short at one page. Her eye fell on a sketch of the back torso of a seated figure that bore a startling resemblance to “The Laocoön.” Then, an even eerier detail emerged. Michelangelo had drawn the upper left arm – muscular details and all – but the lower arm was filled out only in the faintest of outlines. Two little squiggles appear to connect the very anatomically detailed upper arm to the ghost of the lower arm. Catterson pointed out that artists often did sketches in reverse of the actual piece that would be created, hence the drawing of the left rather than the right arm. But more intriguingly, she wondered if the short “squiggles” represented rods that might be used to re-connect an eventual lower right arm during a restoration? If this were the case, was Michelangelo plotting out the eventual restoration of a statue that had not yet been carved? The drawing was dated 1501 – five years before the discovery of “The Laocoön.”

Catterson then began to peruse more sketches, personal letters, marble inventories, and bank statements to back up her dual hypotheses. Everything she found between the years of 1497 and 1501, when the statue was most probably carved, pointed to Michelangelo as the probable forger. “There were about three years when Michelangelo had no documented output, but plenty of marble and money,” she notes.

Reactions to her conclusions have been understandably mixed. “The Laocoön”
has always been the darling of classical art historians. It is stunningly composed, electrifying in subject matter, and unsurpassed in anatomical precision. Dr. Richard Brilliant, a Columbia University colleague and author of “My Laocoon” (University of California Press, 2000) dismissed Catterson’s theory in the New York Times as “noncredible on any count.” On the other front, however, is Michelangelo specialist, William Wallace, art history professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He goes on record as saying: “Nobody who studies classical art . . . wants the “Laocoön.”. . . It really doesn’t look like anything else comparable in the history of classical art.”

So, as in the unfolding of any good mystery, more questions are raised at the end of this chapter:

If “The Laocoön” was, in fact, forged by Michelangelo, did Pope Julius II ever learn that he was conned? And, if so, with the supreme powers of his exalted office, did Julius decide to punish the world’s greatest sculptor? And, if there was a punishment, could it in any way have been a four-year sentence, an arduous, back-breaking four-year sentence of painting the massive ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel?

Whatever the answers, this is a mystery worth following.