When the Laocoön
was discovered in 1506
,
buried in some vineyards that covered the remains of the baths of Titus, painters and collectors were literally astonished by the effect produced on them by that formidable sculpture that represents the scene described by Virgil in
The Aeneid
: the priest Trojan who exhorts his compatriots to reject the gigantic horse in which the Greek soldiers are hiding, and the gods who sentence him by sending two sea serpents to seize him and his two children.
The tension between the exasperated gestures and the spirals of the beasts that are garlanded on the bodies is a “pregnant moment” that has dominated the universal imagination for centuries.
A current version of the Hellenistic myth would be those dark heroes who reveal the secrets of governments and are unjustly punished for having told the truth.
Or more recently, the couple of activists who stuck their hands precisely on the pedestal of the
Laocoön,
currently in the Vatican.
“The climate crisis facing the world is a warning that the world's great leaders ignore, and now we are ignored and repressed,” they declared after their arrest.
The issue of arms and hands is not trivial.
When the
Laocoön
was exhumed , the marble was in relatively good condition, some parts of the snakes were missing, the right arms of
Laocoön
and one of the twins, and the right hand of the other.
Michelangelo convinced Pope Julius II to acquire the sculpture.
Molds and copies were made, the work was completed several times, with the question of the missing arm and its position (up or bent behind the back) being the one that generated the most debate among restorers.
For centuries, the arm of the
Laocoön
was a cyclone in everything, it liked to shake, appear and disappear without desiring stability, a quality that was its own despite its material.
The moment frozen in stone that symbolizes the fall of Troy, which allows the escape of Aeneas and the founding of Rome, led to fruitful aesthetic debates.
In
Laocoön or the limits of painting and poetry
, Gotthold E. Lessing struck the first blow against the ideal of neoclassical beauty defined by Winckelmann, by introducing ugliness and the spectral category of the sublime, themes that have determined our aesthetic criteria.
He also refuted the old Horatian simile of
ut pictura poesis
, separating plastic arts and poetry with a crass wall: while the materials of the former are natural and simultaneous signs, the latter—which he considered superior—plays with arbitrary signs and the valuable arsenal of time.
The German garden expert writer Hans von Trotha shows that it is possible to use them together and mix them.
If this were not the case, what little could a creator say who only valued one of them?
His book,
Pollak's Arm,
is another
Laocoön
that unfolds before our eyes in less than four hours of reading.
It tells the story of the renowned antiquarian and advisor to great collectors Ludwig Pollak (1868-1943), who in 1906 identified the original arm of the Hellenistic sculptural group in an antiquarian and deposited it in the warehouses of the Vatican museums.
Four decades later, an emissary from the Holy See arrives at his
palazzo
in Rome to warn him of an imminent deportation and offer him and his family papal refuge.
The Viennese scholar does not think about escaping from the Nazi guard but rather about remembering his past, but he is not Scheherazade and will end up arrested and murdered in Auschwitz, like so many thousands of Roman Jews.
The novel is also a veiled
Greco
, a marble that stretches over time, the agony in motion, swinging between self-consciousness and death. What narrative audacity, that of Von Trotha!
Look for it in your bookstore
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