Laocoön and His Sons

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry, and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. Tracy. When
we were in Italy, the Vatican museums blew my tiny mind. Yeah. Uh.

(00:24):
We saw so much stuff, and we saw the tiniest
sliver of what they actually have there, which was in
and of itself kind of mind blowing. I saw things
I did not realize the Vatican would have collected, including
an entire room of chagles, which is not what we're
talking about today, but is indicative of the breadth of

(00:46):
their collection. But there were a lot of things that
I was just instantly fascinated by, and some I just
fell in love with, and others that I just couldn't
stop thinking about. And one of those was the kind
of casual way that our tour guide there, and Tracy
and I were in two different groups. Um, the casual
way that my tour guide, Alexandra mentioned the lost Arm

(01:09):
of Laocoon, and that's a story the super up my alley.
But I had never heard about it in any art
history class, despite having taken a number of them. Yeah,
I don't remember if our tour guide told us this story.
I do have multiple photos of this sculpture in my
pictures from when we were there, but like, there was

(01:32):
just so much I don't remember if we talked about
this in our group. We definitely did because I was like, um.
But the other thing I want to mention before we
start is pronunciation, because if you look up how to
pronounce this on a site like four vo or on
YouTube where people are talking about it, uh, boy, will
you hear a whole lot of different versions. I did

(01:53):
this morning when I was like, I'm always better when
I hear people say it. Oh, I've heard people say
it four different ways, so many different ways. I don't
know what to do with this. So um, yeah, there
are some people will say it Leo Cohen almost like
with harder pronunciation of all of the all of the

(02:13):
vowels and consonants. Um are wonderful. Tour guide pronounced it
more like lao kun, which is what a lot of
Europeans seemed to pronounce it like. So that's what we're
going with. UM. I also want to give a quick
warning there is a very sad beat towards the end

(02:33):
of this episode. Involving the holocausts. I just want to
give you a heads up because it does kind of
come out of nowhere um. But most importantly, we're talking
about the whole story of this work of art, which
is known as lao Kun and his Sons. It has
been on quite a journey. The legend that inspired it

(02:53):
is quite fun as well, and that is where we're
going to begin. So, yes, we're going to begin with
who Alcun was in terms of Greek legend, and there
are multiple versions of this story depending on who's the
one telling it. He's pretty much always described as a
trojan and as a priest, often as a priest of Apollo,

(03:15):
but sometimes as a priest of Poseidon. Yes, there I
I out was very tempted to start trying to make
a branching chart of his story and where it varies,
because some will be the same up to a certain
point and then they branch in different ways. They have
some commonalities. Laocoon's story always involves some action that angers

(03:37):
the gods, although this gets a little bit muddled at times.
In some versions. He brought the wrath of Apollo by
breaking an oath of celibacy that he took as a priest,
but even this is characterized a little bit differently depending
on the source. The evidence of his breaking of the
vow is sometimes simply the arrival of two sons, Antipas

(03:59):
and tim Is, but the story is sometimes told with
a little bit more of a salacious tone, with Laocoon
actually having sex with his wife in the sanctuary of Apollo.
There is yet another version where it is Posiden whose
temple is desecrated. So, according to those variations in the story,
either Apollo or Athena punished Laocoon for his sexual exploits

(04:24):
by setting serpents on him, and these serpents crush Laocoon's
twin sons. One interpretation of this story is mentioned in
footnotes of an article by S. B. Tracy, and this
article is titled Laocoon's Guilt. It appeared in the American
Journal of Philology in and this interpretation is that all

(04:46):
of this serves as part of an ongoing perception of
Troy and its people as being known for their sexual misbehavior. Yeah,
it kind of gets set up as though this was
perhaps propaganda that supported these negative ideas about people from
Troy at the time when this legend was being formed,
but there is actually a much more popular and far

(05:07):
more common story that involves Laocoon, the serpents, and the
Sun's although the circumstances that lead to Laocoon's punishment by
the gods are very very different. That version is the
one that's told by the Roman poet Virgil, who lived
in the first century BC and into the beginning of
the Common Era. In Virgil's Aneed Laocun is the only

(05:31):
person in Troy who sees that the horse sent by
the Greeks, that's the one we know as the Trojan horse,
sees that as actually a sneak attack, and the Anied
Laocun is recorded as saying, quote, oh, unhappy citizens, what madness?
Do you think the enemies sailed away? Or do you
think any Greek's gift free of treachery? Is that Ulysses

(05:52):
or Odysseus's reputation. Either there are Greeks and hiding concealed
by the wood, or it's been built as a sheen
to use against our walls, or spy on our homes,
or fall on the city from above, or it hides
some other trick. Trojans don't trust this horse, whatever it is.
I'm afraid of Greeks, even those bearing gifts. I so

(06:16):
want a T shirt now that just this Trojans don't
trust this horse. Yeah, I love it. According to Virgil,
Laocoon's warning brought the wrath of the gods, because this
war that was going on between the Greeks and Troy
was a manifestation of their conflicts and desires. Athena and

(06:36):
Poseidon were said to have been on the side of
the Greeks and the Trojan war, so they did not
appreciate laocoon red flagging that horse. The priest Laocoon used
his spear at this point to pierce the side of
the horse, and then sacrificed a bull and offering to
the gods in the hopes of bringing favor and protection
to Troy. But instead of favor, what appeared were to

(06:59):
ven him as sea serpents. In Virgil's text, here's what
happened next quote. They move on a set course towards Laocoon,
and first each serpent entwines the slender bodies of his
two sons and biting at them, devours their wretched limbs. Then,
as he comes to their aid, weapons in hand, they
seize him too and wreathe him in massive coils, now

(07:22):
encircling his waist twice twice, winding their scaly folds around
his throat. Their high necks and heads tower above him.
He strains to burst the knots with his hands, his
sacred headband drenched in blood and dark venom, while he
sends terrible shouts up to the heavens, like the bellowing
of a bull that has fled wounded from the altar,

(07:45):
shaking the useless axe from its neck, certainly evocative. One
Slocoon was dead from this attack. The Trojans in the
uneeds seeing the serpent attack is a sign that he
had clearly been wrong x scepted the gift of the horse,
and then, of course, the Greeks were able, according to
the legend, to take the city from within. Regardless of

(08:08):
which specifics any reader may prefer regarding this whole Laocoon story,
the image of the priest and his son's being killed
by the serpents sent from the gods for mistakenly offending
said gods has long been a powerful one, and it
led to one of the most compelling statues in all
of history. So around the same time that Virgil wrote

(08:31):
his version of this story. According to art historians, someone
carved a marble statue depicting Laocoon and his son's battling
with serpents. This is sometimes estimated as being created around
two hundred BC. That doesn't quite line up with the
time frames of the sculptors that are usually name checked
in relation to the sculpture. Plenty of the Elder, who

(08:54):
lived in the first century wrote of the statue sculpted
to commemorate the story in his The Natural History. He
attributes the work to three artists, who he mentions by name. Quote.
In the case of several works of very great excellence,
the number of artists that have been engaged upon them
has proved a considerable obstacle to the fame of each,

(09:17):
no individual being able to engross the whole of the credit,
and it being impossible to award it in due proportion
to the names of the several artists combined, such as
the case with the Laocoon, for example, in the Palace
of the Emperor Titus. A work that may be looked
upon as preferable to any other production of the art,

(09:37):
or painting, or of statuary. It is sculpted from a
single block both of the main figure, as well as
the children and the serpents with their marvelous folds. This
group was made in concert by three most eminent artists, Agissander,
Polydorus and Athenodorus, natives of Rhodes. This statue is incredibly dynamic.

(10:01):
Laocoon is shown with his body twisted as he wrestles
with the serpents, and he is flanked on each side
by his sons, who are also entangled in the serpent's bodies.
One of the serpents is about to bite Laocoon on
the hip. One of the children appears to be already
varying near death, the other still struggling free and watching
his brother and father in terror. Laocoon's face shows the

(10:25):
agony of the struggle, although there has been some debate
about his expression. We're going to talk about that later
in the episode. This is considered to be an iconic
artistic representation of agony, as well as an incredible achievement
in representing human anatomy. It's also pretty large. It's almost
life size. The dimensions are listed as a height of

(10:46):
two d eight centimeters, a width of a hundred and
sixty three centimeters, and a depth of a hundred and
twelve centimeters, so that is six point eight feets all,
five point three feet wide and three point seven ft deep.
But despite its great size and the level of admiration
that it garnered, and the fact that it was part
of the collection of the Emperor Titus, just as was

(11:08):
the case with so many other artifacts in the Roman Empire,
this statue of Laocoon and his son's disappeared basically without
any fanfare and with no record of its whereabouts. It
was gone for almost fourteen hundred years. So coming up,
we're going to talk about Laocoon's rediscovery, but first we
will pause for a sponsor break. On January fifteen o six,

(11:41):
vineyard owner Felicie de Fredis made a discovery while working
on his land on one of the seven hills of Rome,
Escalin Hill. It was part of a group of sculptures
that was found on the site, something that happened with
a degree of regularity as Rome went through a growth
spurt starting in the fifteenth century. In this case, the
find was under the site that had been the baths

(12:03):
of Titus, a place known as Le Capoce, which means
the heads. It's about six fathoms that's thirty six feet underground.
The viticulturists find was communicated to the Vatican and Pope
Julius the Second immediately sent a team to investigate. Included
were Michelangelo and sculptor and architect Giuliano de Sangallo. So

(12:25):
for context in terms to Michelangelo's career, he had completed
The David two years before, and he would start his
work on the Sistine Chapel two years later. Sangallo's son Francesco,
also went to the site, and in the late fifteen sixties,
which was sixty years after the find, he wrote about
being there when the statue was first discovered. Francesco wrote, quote,

(12:49):
the first time I was in Rome, when I was
very young. The Pope Julius the Second was told about
the discovery of some very beautiful statues in a vineyard
near Santa Maria Madio Are on the Escolan Hill. The
Pope ordered one of his officers to run and tell
Giuliano de Sangallo to go and see them. He set
off immediately, since Picolango Bunorati was always to be found

(13:13):
at our house. My father having summoned him and having
assigned him the commission of the Pope's tomb. My father
wanted him to come along too. I joined up with
my father, and off we went. I had climbed down
to where the statues were, when immediately my father said,
that is the laocoon, which Pliny mentions. Then they dug

(13:33):
the whole wider so that they could pull the statue out.
As soon as it was visible. Everyone started to draw,
all the while discoursing on ancient things, chatting about the
ones in Florence, the ones he references their ancient statues
owned by the Medici. Just a few weeks later, a
deal was struck between the Vatican and Fliegia. If Freddy's

(13:56):
in exchange for the statue, Freddis would receive as income
um the tolls from one of the gates of Rome's
that was the Porto San Giovanni. Shortly after that, the
statue was moved to the vatcan It was placed in
the Cortile del Belvedere, and its display position has since evolved.
With the establishment of the Museo Pio Clementino in the

(14:17):
seventeen seventies, it's in the gallery known as the Octagonal Courtyard. Yeah,
we'll talk a little bit more about how it got
moved around in a minute. The establishment of the Laocun
sculpture as a possession of the Vatican was and remains significant.
Pope Julius the Second put the artwork on public display,
which marks the opening of the Vatican Museums to the public.

(14:40):
Julius the second felt that it was important for people
to see this work of art because he saw looking
at great art as a means of spiritual renewal. Unsurprisingly,
the depiction of Laocun and his Son's was not intact.
When it was discovered there were pieces missing, most notably
the right arm of each of the figures. A Additionally,

(15:00):
the son on the right of the statue was detached
from the rest. Laocoon's missing arm in particular, left the
work feeling incomplete to enough people that after several years,
the Pope's architect Donato Bramante, who started working on the
Vatican's velvet or Court in fifteen o five and St.
Peter's Basilica in fifteen o six, pulled the most accomplished

(15:21):
sculptures of the day to see what they thought should
be done. This is sometimes described as a contest, and
I suppose it could have been but if it was,
it was pretty informal. This challenge was issued by Bramante
in Rafaelo Sanzio di Urbino, who was better known simply
as Raphael, suggested that the arms should extend upward, but

(15:43):
he wasn't even really in the mix. As far as
this competition. Bramante had made him the judge of the
whole thing. Jacopo d Antonio Sansovino also put forth a
plan for an upward reaching arm. Michelangelo had a different
idea that, based on the sculpt of the musculature of
the chest and back and shoulder, that the arm should

(16:05):
be bent back, as though Laokun was reaching to grasp
the serpent on his back, and the end sense of
Veno's idea one out, and the statue was restored with
an upraised arm. This was not a particularly surprising decision.
Michelangelo and Raphael were arrivals. They had an assortment of conflicts,

(16:25):
making opposite decisions from one another. Not too surprising. Yeah,
that's the gentlest way we can describe their relationship. Michelangelo
in particular, was very angry about a lot of opportunities
that Raphael received. The restoration of this sculpture, including not
just the arm, but several other pieces as well, was
completed in fifty Initially, the extension that they had decided

(16:49):
upon was used just so that copies could be cast
to the piece. It wasn't actually affixed to the sculpture
in any kind of permanent way. Then one of michelangelo students,
Shiovanni and al Montorloli, attached a version of the arm
for display that reached upward. That one actually reached upward
at a more um aggressive upward rise than even the

(17:11):
one that had had won this little discussion among the artists.
When it was done, the composition was undeniably eye catching.
It created a diagonal line that drew the viewer's eyes upward,
and it was viewed by a lot of people. It
was also drawn by a lot of people, and it
was lauded for its beauty with this new appendage and
the composition of it, although not universally, of course, it's art.

(17:35):
Everybody has a different opinion. So now we have to
jump ahead two d and fifty years basically to April
two seventy nine six, when Napoleon Bonaparte moved his forces
into Italy and an effort to confront Austrian troops there.
Although Napoleon's forces were not expected to fare very well
because they were outnumbered, Bonaparte was aggressive and managed to victory.

(18:00):
It was the first of many as he chased Austrian
forces through the country. He took a lot of Italian
territories in the process. That is, of course, the very
brief version of the story. But the important thing about
that conflict as it relates to Laocoon is the resulting
Treaty of Tolentino. This treaty, signed in February seventeven, was

(18:22):
the result of months of negotiations between the Papal States
and France, and in that treaty, France officially gained control
of many places it had occupied since the invasion, and
the Vatican officially and formally recognized France as the owner
of a number of works of art that had been
looted during all of this, including the Laocoon. So that's

(18:46):
how in July of sev the sculpture was shipped to Paris.
It was to go on display at the Museais Central Dessart,
now part of the Louver, and the sculpture stayed in
Paris for the next seventeen years. When Napoleon was defeated
at Waterloo in June of eighteen fifteen, that agreement was
voided and the art that had been signed over was

(19:08):
returned to Italy. The journey home to Rome started for
Laucoon and his son's in October of eighteen fifteen. It
took several months to get there. It arrived the following January. Yeah,
that was not the only piece of art that was
shipped back, but for the purposes of our story, it
is of course the most important. And once the sculpture
was back in Italy, it was assessed the previously completed

(19:31):
additions needed to be reattached. They had been removed before
the statue was shipped to Paris. The task felt a
sculptor Antonio Canova. He actually thought that the prior editions,
the upstretched arm and the arm that was also added
to the sun on the viewers right that son is
often referred to as the older son. Uh kind of
a thought those were not really correct. But he replaced

(19:54):
them according to the prior restoration. And he actually told
one of his colleagues in a letter that he knew
the decisions on their composition had been made in error,
but he felt that if he changed them or even
raised the issue, it was just going to start a
big fight with both artists and historians, and he wanted
no part of it because there was no benefit to
him and he did not see any possible way he

(20:16):
would come out of such a conflict unscathed. But that
was not the end of the Laocun makeovers. What maybe
the most surprising of all of them is yet to come,
and we will get to it right after we hear
from some sponsors that keep Stuffy miss in history class going.

(20:41):
Almost four hundred years after the Laocoon was found in
Rome and acquired by the Vatican Museum, the mystery of
Laocoon's missing arm was solved a little more satisfactorily through
a stroke of luck and a good and well trained eye.
At the time, the curator of the Museo Branco in
Rome was archaeologist Ludwig Pollock, who was born in Czechoslovakian

(21:03):
eighteen sixty eight. As a boy, Ludwig had always been
drawn to antiquity, and he studied art history and archaeology
in Prague and Vienna before moving on to Rome, where
he settled down for the rest of his life, and
in Rome he became recognized as an expert at assessing
antiques and being able to correctly identify both their origin
and their value. When Pollock happened to be visiting a

(21:27):
Stonemason shop in Rome on the Via lab Acada, he
spotted the arm. It was at this point just a
few hundred meters away from the place where the Laocoon
had first been found. Polack had studied the Laocoon and
his son's enough to just visually I d the arm
as a likely match. I feel like if this had
happened in a different year, it would be something we

(21:49):
would talk about on Unearthed. Yeah, and it really does
speak to Pollock's great skill because he was there was
one right up I read of him. I had to
read it and train Leasian where they were like. No,
he could with a glance tell you correctly like what
era something was from and how much like it would
be valued at. He was just incredibly skilled. Poblic had

(22:10):
actually seen the arm in nineteen o three when he
was scouting for another project, but he didn't publish his
findings until nineteen o five. He took the time in
between discovery and going public to collect supporting evidence, and
he even took it to the Vatican during that time,
in nineteen o four, presenting it to the curators of
the art collection there, and he wrote in his diary
of that particular meeting quote the custodians were quite astonished. Sadly,

(22:36):
in nineteen forty three, Pollock appeared on the Gestapo list
of Jews in Rome that were to be rounded up
during the occupation. Pollock didn't believe he was in danger.
He was prominent, guess, he was famous for his work
and curating and dealing art and the Laocoon Arm in particular,
but he hadn't done anything wrong or suspicious. He didn't

(22:58):
think there was any reason for anyone to tar get him.
Even the Vatican is said to have sent a driver
to his home to offer to take him to the
safety of Vatican City, and he declined. But on October
sixteenth he was arrested with his family and they were
all shipped to Auschwitz berken Now, and they were murdered there.
Although Ligig Pollock did not live to see it. The

(23:20):
arm that he had spotted was eventually reunited and restored
to the statue in ninety seven, and it was a
perfect fit. There was even a drill hole in the
arm that perfectly matched up to a drill hole on
the torso, and it was just as Michelangelo had described
as the most likely position, bent behind Laocoon, grasping at

(23:43):
the serpent on his back. And that is the version
that remains on display today, even though it's been sixty
five years since the correct arm was restored. You'll see
a lot of images of the Laocoon that showed the
upstretched arm. It's not because they're the photos of the
one in the Vatican, but because there are a whole
lot of copies that were made of the statue. These

(24:04):
are floating around and all kinds of other collections. A
lot of times those have been photographed. Uh. I saw
one as I was listening to lots of different art
historians say the name of the sculpture was a copy
of it in another collection. I don't remember how the
arm was positioned though, because I was just listening for

(24:25):
the words. Yeah. A lot of them do have that
upstretched raised to the Heaven's arm. And it's kind of
great because it makes it really easy to compare and
contrast how the the two different versions look. And you
can kind of see where the musculature does, as Michelangelo said,
match up to to the gesture he finally ended up with.

(24:47):
And we mentioned earlier that this statue is sometimes dated
to circuit two and that being contradicted by the lifetimes
of the artists that were mentioned as creating it. But
though Plenty aimed Agissander, Polydorus and Athenodorus of Rhodes, he
wasn't accurate in his description of the statue, so that

(25:08):
kind of calls his entire account into question. The big
problem with his description of it is that he claimed
it was carved from one block of marble. That is untrue.
It is made of several pieces seven in fact, of
marble that are expertly fitted together. There have even been
theories that this dates back to the fourth century b C.

(25:30):
The Vatican Museum was its date of creation as being
around forty b C. The sculpture doesn't really match stylistically
with the fourth century BC date. The Classic period had
a lot more static poses in sculptures, but it does
match with the more dynamics styles found in artwork from
the Hellenistic period. That period is dated from three BC

(25:54):
to thirty three b c E. There's also a possible
explanation for that disparity. Are a lot of art historians
today who agree that the Laocoon that Plenty wrote about
was a copy of an older bronze sculpture. Yes, so
this one that we're seeing is probably the copy. Uh.

(26:16):
There have always been more controversies about this work of art.
From a composition and artistic perspective, There's been a lot
of discussion and debate. In the mid seventeen hundreds, German
art historian Johann Joachim Wincklemann had written about the work
as an ideal representation of beauty. He had also commented
on the arm and its debate, writing quote, this arm

(26:38):
entangled by the snake must have been folded over the
head of the statue. Yet it looks as if the
arm folded above the head would have in some way
made the work wrong. In seventeen sixty six, German philosopher
Gotthold Lessing wrote an essay about art that was inspired
by the Laocoon statue. It was titled Laocoon or the

(26:58):
Limitations of poech E. The majority of the work is
really about visual art versus poetical art. And the Laocoon
is only discussed in the first part, but Lessing makes
the case that the Laocoon is ultimately not conveying a
realistic scenario because viewers would not be able to cope
with it. He wrote, quote, the demands of beauty cannot

(27:21):
be reconciled with the pain and all its disfiguring violence,
so it had to be reduced. The scream had to
be softened to a sigh. Not because screaming betrays an
ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a
disgusting manner. Simply imagine Laocoon's mouth forced wide open, and
then Judge imagined him screaming, and then look. From a

(27:44):
form which inspired pity, it has now become an ugly,
repulsive figure from which we gladly turn away. For the
fight of pain provokes distress. However, the distress should be
transformed through beauty into the tender feeling of pity. There
are lots and lots of papers and books written about

(28:04):
whether the depiction of pain in the sculpture is beautiful
or horrifying, and what it means in context of ideas
of Greek manhood, Comparing and contrasting in some cases with
Dcleman's and lessons takes on it as it relates to
the Laocoon. So many papers and books. I just want
to point that out if you have read one that

(28:26):
you love. I did not read them all, obviously, and
I apologize that it's not included so many, so many.
One aspect of the statue that has troubled art historians
and critics is the expression on Laocoon's face as a
scientific study, specifically his forehead. If you look at his eyebrows,

(28:47):
they're clearly tensed. They create a ridge in the center
that points slightly upward. It's a pretty obvious expression of anguish,
struggle and pain. But then his forehead has ripples on
it and they stretched from side to side. They're unaffected
by the furrowed brow. They look relatively placid. This has
really irked a lot of people over the years. French

(29:11):
neurologist Guillaume Benjamin Armand Duchen, often named as Deuschan de Boulogne,
declared that the combination of characteristics was physically impossible and
that the disparity detracted from the arts impact. Building on that,
in eighteen seventy two, Charles Darwin wrote about the issue

(29:32):
in his work The Expression of the Emotions in Man
and Animals, and he wrote it in a way that
it first seems kind of damning, but then acknowledges that
this might have just had to have been an aesthetic
choice writing quote. The ancient Greek sculptors were familiar with
the expression as shown in the statues of Laocoon and Aretino,
but as Dechen remarks, they carried the transverse furrows across

(29:54):
the whole breadth of the forehead, and thus committed a
great anatomical mistake. This is likewise the case in some
modern statues. It is, however, more probable that these wonderfully
accurate observers intentionally sacrificed truth for the sake of beauty
than that they made a mistake, for rectangular furrows on

(30:15):
the forehead would not have had a grand appearance on
the marble. William Blake saw this piece not as a
representation of the story of Laocun, but as a copy
and a mediocre one of a Hebraic work that depicted
Jehovah and his son's Adam and Satan. Blake used the
image of the Laocoon statue and an illustration for the

(30:39):
Cyclopedia or Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and Literature, which
he illustrated for Welsh botanist and minister Abraham Reeves. Blake's
two dimensional image also included inscriptions surrounding the image of
Laocoon and his sons which commented on Christianity, morality, the arts,
and the quest for wealth. Yeah that's if you ever

(31:00):
just want to spend some time watching an artists work
through his snark about a thing. Read all of those
inscriptions that William Blake put on his illustration of the Laocoon.
He seems to think it's great that they're getting bitten
by the snakes up. In two thousand five, art historian

(31:21):
Lynn Katterson put forth a very controversial idea that the
Laocoon may have been a forgery by Michelangelo. She cited
an anatomy study drawing the artist had done of a
man's back is a piece of evidence, noting that in
her interpretation, it appeared similar to the back of the Laocoon.
If you've studied Michelangelo, you know he often drew out

(31:44):
his his plan and kind of did anatomical studies before
he started carving. She believed that Michelangelo may have been
hoping that the wealthy Medici family would have wanted to
purchase ancient grow Greek and Roman objects that was something
they collected, and that this sculpture would have ent ice them.
While Katersson said she never set out to cause an uproar,

(32:04):
many many art historians have gotten very angry about it
and spoken out against her theory. Art historian Richard Brilliant,
author of My Laocoon Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks,
called her theory quote non credible on any account. In
January of this year, lit Big Pollock and his family

(32:25):
were remembered with memorial stones that were set in place
outside their last address at Piazza Santi Apostolie. And now
you can go see the Laocoon if you happen to
be in Rome and visit the Vatican Museum, which I
highly recommend it. Be ready for your brain to be
putting at the end of that. There's so much stuff

(32:46):
there is. It's kind of one of the things where
I wish in the future that I could take a
leisurely trip to Rome and just spend like days visiting
the Vatican museums and go into one area at a
time and just skip the rest and be like today
is sculpture, only today is paintings. Um. That is the

(33:12):
story so far of the Laocoon. Who knows what else
may happen? Uh, Since we're only a hundred years out
from the last development, there could be more in it's
uh two thousand plus year life. In the meantime, though,
I have a kind of a fun listener mail from
our listener, Aaron who writes High Ladies, longtime listener, sort

(33:36):
of from both ends. But I'm not sure if I
will ever get my PhD. I guess I'm just a
master student in history. I was listening in early May
when you both talked about the Star Wars rides at
Disney's Hollywood Studios. I had just gone there with my
family and had the experience that should give Tracy some
potential comfort. I have written the Star Tours ride ever
since the original at Disneyland, and when I was younger

(33:58):
it was a repeat, great fun ride. In April on
Spring break, me and my son's were at disney World
and the line wait for the newest Star Wars rides
were such that we decided to ride the updated version
of the classic first. It was cool that there are
cameos from the new movies, but I felt very nauseous
and jittery by the end of the ride. It seemed
that my time with roller coasters must be ending. The

(34:21):
next ride was Millennium Falcon Smugglers Run, and that was
great fun getting to pup my way through the ride
and very little nausea. Last was the longest wait time
Rise of the Resistance, and that ride basically takes you
into a Star Wars movie. The weights between that and
the actual ride were not great, and again no nausea.
By the end of our trip in Orlando, I had

(34:42):
ridden quite a few rather intense coasters and was a
bit nauseous, but had a lot of fun, but not
nearly as bad as that first Star Tours ride. I
have a theory that there are people who cannot tolerate
those types of rides at all, those who can excessively
tolerate those rides and love every second, but most of
us are in between and our bodies it used to
it and enjoy the ride. There's probably scientific evidence to

(35:03):
support this, but sorry, I'm too lazy to look it up. Anyway,
to each their own, and we spent so much money
just getting in the park that I was going to
ride the rides. Um. I had meant to write sooner,
but life got in the way. As it does. Listening
to the comments about motion sickness made me want to
share my own experience. Listening to your podcast to certainly
help during the past few horrible years. Knowledge of the

(35:23):
past can help give us perspective for today. Thanks Aaron. Aaron,
I can tell you why you still have trouble with
Star Tours and not the other rides. I don't think
Tracy has been on the other two attractions. They don't
involve three D glasses. That's what it is. It's the
three D part. It's like the gimble rig may or
may not make you ill, but the gimble rig plus

(35:45):
three D, which your brain is trying to perceive while
also maintaining your physical equilibrium, is what makes most people
feel a little queasy, or can do it in Tracy's
case quite quite as I recall, UM, So take heart
for anybody that that has that problem, the other two
probably won't bother you at all, um and are wonderful,
So I just in case anybody was fearful after that discussion,

(36:09):
you don't have to be rise to the Resistance. In particular,
you could not do three D glasses because you're getting
on and off different ride vehicles and walking through things
at some parts and writing things at others, and that
would be a trip and not very fun at all,
and it would break the immersion. Uh you would like
to write to us about your vacations to theme parks
or the Vatican museums or anywhere else or anything else,

(36:32):
You can do that at History podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. You can also find us on social media
as at missed in History And if you would like
to subscribe to the podcast and haven't gotten around too yet,
good news super easy. You can do that on the
i heeart radio app or anywhere else you listen to
your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is

(36:56):
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

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Tracy Wilson

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