The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · a group in white marble: a father and his two sons in the coils of two serpents, the father on an altar · carved in the round and composed for one frontal view · the group as it stands since 1957 to 1960, when the later restorations were removed and the father’s bent right arm, found in 1906, was set back on the body · named by Pliny the Elder as the work of Hagesandros, Polydoros and Athanodoros of Rhodes · the date unsettled, the proposals running from about 200 BC to the early first century AD · found on the Esquiline, Rome, on 14 January 1506 · Vatican Museums, Museo Pio-Clementino, in the octagonal court of the Belvedere
Mode
Hellenistic pathos sculpture concentrated in the round around one block and composed as a relief
Mythos
A father and his line bound together in one divine sentence; the priest struck at the altar in the act of his office
Phase
One instant, the bite, with three stages of one fate side by side: the younger son dying, the father struggling, the elder son perhaps escaping
Presentation
Marble group on a base, three figures and two serpents, built for one frontal view; the father’s arm found in 1906 and set back in 1957 to 1960, the later restorations removed
Register
Dread and grandeur in one register of agony, pitched at one height across the whole surface
Scale
Three bodies, one coil, one instant
Governing Proposition
A man of full strength, at the height of his effort, is losing, and losing his children with him. Two serpents bind a father and two sons into one block of marble: the younger son sinking at the left, the elder half free at the right, the father between them on an altar, his chest lifted against the coil and his mouth open. The wager of the group is that a body held at one instant between resistance and collapse, carved at the scale of a body and seen by one, can make the viewer’s own muscles answer, and that the strength of the father can be shown as the exact measure of his defeat.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A man is falling back onto an altar with two serpents wound about him and about his two sons. The father is at the centre, seated or sinking on the block, his chest lifted against the coil, his right arm bent back toward his head. At his right the younger son, already bitten, sinks with his head falling back. At his left the elder son stands half free, one leg still being wound, his head turned to his father. The group is white marble and stands in the Vatican Museums, in the octagonal court of the Belvedere in the Museo Pio-Clementino, where it has stood, with one interruption, since a few months after it was found in 1506.
The serpents are not decoration. They are what makes three bodies one block. One coil passes through all three bodies, and the second serpent’s head is at the father’s hip at the instant of the bite. Take away the father and nothing is left; take away the younger son and the father has no one to fail; take away the serpents and the bodies fall apart into three studies of strain. Only the elder son yields to the subtractive test. The group reads whole without him, and his separateness at the edge is why it has long been argued whether he was set differently or carved apart.
The group is carved in the round and composed as a relief. Its three bodies spread across one shallow plane facing the viewer, and from that front everything reads: the three stages of one fate, dying, struggling, perhaps escaping, set side by side. From the sides and the back it weakens. The sons are adult bodies at about two thirds of the father’s size, a convention the eye accepts and not a necessity, and the altar is barely legible as an altar. The work is one front, built to be met face to face by a body of the same scale.
Movement II
The father’s torso is anatomy in action. Each muscle is carved at the strain the coil and the effort put on it, and the skin passing over rib and abdomen is modelled, not schematised. The chest is lifted against the coil; the foot is braced and the toes are clenched. The serpents are carved free across and between the bodies, their coils undercut so that the stone reads as weight crossing flesh. This is command of marble at the scale of the body, and it is what the work is made of: take the carving to a lower pitch and the knowledge goes with it.
The moment is the height of effort, not what comes after it. The man is of full strength and is losing, and his strength is the measure of his defeat. That is what the group brings into the open: the body as the place where a will is overpowered, and a father who cannot save his children. The disclosure is exact and it holds. What it does not carry is the meaning the story gives it, that the priest had told the truth about the horse and was destroyed for it. That belongs to the poem. On the stone alone, the disclosure is of suffering and of helpless fatherhood.
The face holds an extreme expression in a symmetrical frame: the brows drawn up and inward, the mouth open. Lessing, in 1766, read that mouth as a sigh and not a scream, and drew from it a theory of what visual art can show of pain and where its limit lies. The elevation is dread and grandeur at once, and it recurs across the whole surface, in the face, the torso, the bite at the hip, the younger son’s head, the father’s foot. It is one register, held at one height throughout. Burke and the eighteenth century took the group as a type of the sublime of pain, and the whiteness and the scale make it a monument of agony rather than a scene of one.
Movement III
Pliny the Elder saw, or recorded, a group of this subject in the house of the emperor Titus, and called it a work “opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae artis praeferendum”, to be preferred to every other work of painting and of sculpture. He said it was made “ex uno lapide”, from one stone, father, sons and the serpents’ coils, by Hagesandros, Polydoros and Athanodoros of Rhodes. The same three names are signed on the groups from the Odyssey found at Sperlonga in 1957. The attribution of this marble rests on those two witnesses, and the maker is recorded as attributed.
Whether this marble is the work Pliny saw, or a marble after an earlier bronze, is open, and so is the date. The proposals run from about 200 BC, which would make the group a copy of a Pergamene bronze, to the late first century BC or the early first century AD, the time of the Rhodian workshop that signed the Sperlonga groups for a Tiberian villa. Pliny’s one stone stands against joins that have been reported in the marble since the sixteenth century; the number of blocks is not given here. The desk scores this object, as of about two thousand years.
The inheritance is the pathos style already made at Pergamon: the gigantomachy of the Great Altar, where a giant gripped by Athena throws back his head as the father does here, and the Gauls. The group does not depart from that tradition. It concentrates it, in the round, around one block, into one frontal plane: three bodies locked by one continuous coil, a story compressed into three stages of one fate. If it follows Virgil, it departs from him in staging, the father and the sons struck together. These are departures of degree, made by a proven workshop in a proven style for a Roman house, and The Swerve stands at 8.1 for it: a wager on a proven path, carried to its limit.
Movement IV
The group was found on 14 January 1506 on the Esquiline in Rome, in the vineyard of Felice de’ Fredis. Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo were sent to see it, and Sangallo named it from Pliny. Julius II bought it, and within months it was set in the statue court of the Belvedere. It had been buried about fourteen centuries. It left once: taken to Paris under the Treaty of Tolentino in 1797, it came back in 1816.
It was found without the father’s right arm, and in the sixteenth century the arm was restored outstretched; later restorations were added to the sons and to the serpents. For four centuries the group was known with that gesture. In 1906 Ludwig Pollak found a marble arm, bent back toward the head, and it proved to be the father’s. Under Filippo Magi, in 1957 to 1960, the later restorations were removed and the found arm was set back on the body. The gesture that makes the group, the arm bent back and not flung out, is the original, and the form now standing is closer to the ancient form than at any time since 1506.
The reassembly is not closed. Where the elder son belongs relative to the father has been argued since Magi’s work, and the losses that remain take a little from the form. The fabric is marble broken and rejoined, worked over and then unworked by restorers. The Imperishable stands at 9.0: high, because the father, the younger son and the coils that carry the work survive and the defining gesture was found again; below the top, for the long burial, the losses and the open reassembly. The removed restorations, the casts and the copies are context, not the work.
Movement V
Its reach began in 1506 and has not stopped. Michelangelo answered it in the Slaves; Titian’s caricature turned it into apes; Rubens, Bernini and El Greco took it up. It became part of the Belvedere canon by which the Renaissance and the academies measured the body, and its casts stood in every academy. Winckelmann’s “edle Einfalt und stille Größe”, noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, was a theory of art drawn in part from it; Lessing named his treatise of 1766 after it; Goethe wrote on it; Blake engraved it with an inscription reading it as Jehovah and his two sons; Greenberg called his essay of 1940 “Towards a Newer Laocoon”. Pressure on Tradition stands at 8.8 for this, discounted for the fourteen centuries in the ground and the small reach in its own field.
The argument has been continuous for five centuries, and much of it has been archaeological: the date, the relation to Virgil, the one stone and the joins, copy or original, and the reconstruction. The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable stand level at 9.0, and only The Made at 9.3 stands higher. The meaning returns to one question, pain and its limit, rather than opening several, and the orders the group holds are those one instant can hold: the family, the sacred, the natural, the body in extremity. History and the city enter only with the story, and The Encompassed stands at 7.4.
The twelve sum to 103.6 and stand at 8.6, in Tier IV. Two gates of the summit hold it there. The Swerve at 8.1, because it culminates the Pergamene style rather than departing from it, and The Unconcealment at 8.3, because its meaning beyond suffering is carried by a story the stone does not tell. Rodin’s The Gates of Hell stands level at 8.6: it turns further and discloses more, and is less necessary and less whole. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, its nearest kin in Hellenistic marble, stands below at 8.3. Michelangelo’s Pietà stands above at 8.9, with the same command and a fuller disclosure and turn. The Aeneid, which carries the story the group stages, stands at 9.5, and the group is not scored against its source.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test, part by part. The father cannot go: his torso is the work. The younger son, already bitten and sinking, cannot go: he is what the father fails to save, and the second serpent’s coil passes through him to the father. The serpents are the structure, not decoration; they bind three bodies into one block. What yields is the elder son. He stands at the right edge with his leg still being wound, his head turned to the father, half outside the action, and the group reads whole without him. The sons’ scale, adult bodies at two thirds of the father’s size, is a convention the eye accepts, not a necessity, and the altar is barely legible as an altar.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Disclosure through image is credited fully. What the group brings into the open is the body as the place where a will is overpowered: a man of full strength, at the height of effort, losing, and losing his children with him. That is a condition, not only a mood. The father cannot save his sons, and his strength is exactly the measure of his defeat. Lessing drew a second disclosure from it, about what visual art can show of pain, and it holds. What holds the axis below the gate is that the meaning which would make it a truth about justice, the priest who told the truth about the horse and was destroyed for it, belongs to the story and is not in the marble.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is high and of one register, dread and grandeur at once, and it recurs across the whole surface rather than in one place. The father’s face, the brows drawn up and inward, the mouth open; the torso, every muscle at its limit, the chest lifted against the coil; the serpent’s head at the hip, the instant of the bite; the younger son’s head falling back; the father’s foot braced, the toes clenched. The scale and the whiteness make it a monument of agony rather than a scene of one, and Burke and the eighteenth century took it as a type of the sublime of pain. Held below the top for range: one register throughout, without the relief of any other.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built and load-bearing. The serpents sent by a god are the literal armature of the composition: one coil passes through all three bodies, so the archetype, a father and his line bound together in one divine sentence, a man against a force he cannot match, is the structure and not an allusion attached to it. The priest at the altar, struck in the act of his office, makes the sacred order part of the form. The fall of Troy is carried by implication, and for a Roman owner the line to Aeneas and to Rome. Blake’s inscribed engraving, which reads the group as Jehovah and his two sons, is reception. The particular is weaker: these are ideal bodies of a heroic type, and the sons are miniature men.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is the Hellenistic pathos style already made at Pergamon: the gigantomachy of the Great Altar, where a giant gripped by Athena throws back his head as Laocoön does, and the Gauls. The group does not depart from that tradition; it concentrates it, in the round, around one block, into a relief-like frontal plane. Its departures are real but of degree: three bodies locked by one continuous coil; the story compressed into three stages of one fate; the moment taken at the height of effort rather than after it. What it staked is not known and cannot be shown: a commission for a Roman house, by a proven workshop, in a proven style. A wager on a proven path, carried to its limit, and the lowest of the twelve but one.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Substitute a different form and the work loses most of what it knows. The knowledge is of a body held at one instant between resistance and collapse, and it requires a single unmoving form at the scale of a body, seen by a body: the viewer’s own muscles answer. El Greco’s painting of the subject becomes a landscape of fate. Virgil’s poem makes it an event in time, with a cry that rises “ad sidera” (to the stars), which the stone cannot utter. Lessing’s treatise is the proof that form is the instrument here: the open mouth is what marble can do with a scream. Held below the top by frontality: a group carved in the round and conceived as a relief, which weakens from the sides and the back.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: five centuries of argument since 1506, on meaning and on form, and the yield has not ended. On meaning, Winckelmann’s “edle Einfalt und stille Größe” (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur), Lessing’s Laokoon of 1766 on the limits of painting and poetry, Goethe’s essay, Blake, and Greenberg’s “Towards a Newer Laocoon” of 1940, each a theory of art drawn from this object. On form and history, the date, the relation to Virgil, Pliny’s one stone against the reported joins, copy or original, and the reconstruction itself, which the found arm overturned and which is still argued in the elder son’s place. Held below the top because much of the yield is archaeological, and the meaning returns to one question, pain and its limit.
Score: 9.0 / 10
On view since 1506, so force and reach are scored together. The field is late Hellenistic and Roman sculpture of its own decades. The intrinsic force is high but culminating: the pathos style brought to its most concentrated statement rather than a new possibility. The same workshop’s groups at Sperlonga are its nearest answer in antiquity, and Pliny’s praise is the reach in its own time that is documented. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: delayed about fourteen centuries, and then among the widest of any single sculpture. Michelangelo’s Slaves, Titian’s caricature of the group as apes, Rubens, Bernini, El Greco; the Belvedere canon by which the academies measured the body, and the casts in all of them; Lessing’s founding text of aesthetics, which takes its name. The delay is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over about two thousand years. The form is legible and largely whole: the father, the younger son and the coils carry the work, and they survive. What was lost was arms and coils, the father’s right arm among them, and the father’s arm was found again: the gesture that makes the group, bent back toward the head and not flung out, is the original. The remaining losses and the open question of the elder son’s place take a little from the form. Presence: buried about fourteen centuries, then as continuously present as any sculpture since 1506, through removal to Paris and return. Fabric: marble broken and rejoined, worked over and then unworked by restorers.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of marble at the scale of the body, and the making is load-bearing. The torso is anatomy in action, each muscle shown at the strain the coil and the effort put on it; the passage of skin over rib and abdomen is carved, not schematised. The serpents are carved free across and between the bodies, their coils undercut so that the marble reads as weight crossing flesh. The father’s face holds an extreme expression in a symmetrical frame without caricature. The costs are charged: the sons’ bodies as reduced adults, the elder son’s slacker finish against the father, and the back and sides left summary because the group is built for one face. The highest of the twelve; the composition, not the chisel, limits it.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the younger son dying at the left, his head fallen back, and the elder son at the right, still alert, turning to his father. One law governs both. Every body is at the place in the coil that sets its fate, and the coil is continuous. The tone holds throughout, one register of agony in three degrees, and the scale holds as a convention. What strains the law is the elder son’s partial independence, in the composition and in the open question of where he belongs, and the frontality, which is one law for the front and a weaker one for the round. The range covered is narrow in kind, three bodies and one event, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held are the family, a father and two sons and his failure to protect them; the sacred, the priest at the altar, the god’s serpents, a divine punishment; the natural, the serpents as animals and the body as an organism under force; and the body and consciousness in extremity. They are held in one structure, by one coil. History and the state, the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome, are present only for a viewer who knows the story. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form itself: one event, one instant, three bodies, with history, labour and the city absent or carried only by the story. For a single sculptural group the reach is real, and the mark describes the form.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, The Bottomless Well and The Imperishable at 9.0, The Sublime at 8.9. A command of marble that carves anatomy in action and coils that read as weight crossing flesh; five centuries of argument on meaning and form that drew theories of art from this object; a defining gesture found again after four centuries and set back; and an elevation of dread and grandeur that recurs across the whole surface.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.4: one event, one instant, three bodies, with history and the city carried only by the story. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.1 and The Unconcealment at 8.3: a style concentrated rather than departed from, and a disclosure of suffering whose meaning beyond suffering belongs to the poem. The Inevitable at 8.4 is held by the elder son, the one part the group can stand without.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 and The Swerve at 8.1 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met, no axis it governs falling below The Swerve at 8.1, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.4. Every condition but the Epochal Gate is met. The twelve sum to 103.6, an average of 8.63, which displays as 8.6 in Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the marble group of Laocoön and his two sons in the coils of two serpents, in the Vatican Museums, Museo Pio-Clementino, in the octagonal court of the Belvedere, long familiar in photographs, casts and the literature on it, not from the stone in hand. The unit scored is the group as it stands now: after the removal of the Renaissance and later restorations in 1957 to 1960 under Filippo Magi, and with the father’s bent right arm, found by Ludwig Pollak in 1906, set back on the body. The restorations of the sixteenth century and after, now removed, the casts and the copies are context and are not scored; the losses, the restorations and their removal bear on The Imperishable only. The maker is recorded as attributed: the names are Pliny the Elder’s (Natural History 36.37) and are signed on the Sperlonga groups found in 1957. Whether this marble is the work Pliny saw or a marble after an earlier bronze is open, and the date is given as unsettled, the proposals running from about 200 BC to the early first century AD; the desk scores this object. The elder son’s original place relative to the father is argued and is given as contested; that the group is joined from more than one block is given as reported, against Pliny’s one stone. The group carries no words. Quoted, in the original only and each with an English gloss: two phrases of Pliny’s notice, one of Virgil’s account of the priest’s cry, and Winckelmann’s phrase. Figures and facts that could not be verified, among them the height and width of the group, the number of blocks and the line of each modern join, the name and year of the sixteenth-century restorer of the arm, and which parts of the sons’ arms and of the serpents remain missing, are not given.