Questionable Antiquity of the "Ancient" Statues

KorbenDallas said:

Laocoön and His Sons
Laocoön Group

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[Michelangelo] was inspired, it has seemed fairly clear for the past several centuries, by an ancient Greek masterpiece dug up in Rome in January 1506, which depicted Laocoön, the high priest of Troy, and his sons being devoured by snakes. Now, though, an art historian is claiming that the ancient masterpiece - which fascinated not just Michelangelo but Blake, who engraved it, and Napoleon, who seized it - is not what it seems. She says it was carved by Michelangelo himself...

When Michelangelo and his rival Sangallo were called to see the latest find from Nero's palace - believed at that time to be the Baths of Titus - they recognised it as just such a lost masterpiece. Here, Sangallo saw at once, was the sculpture the Roman writer Pliny the Elder calls the greatest work of art in the world: a gory representation of Laocoön and his sons and the "wonderful clasping coils" of the snakes that came out of the sea and killed them. The story is in Virgil's Aeneid; the sculpture, according to Pliny, was in the palace of Titus in Rome. Lo and behold, that was where it was found.

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Yet now, this supreme survival of the ancient world has, purportedly, been exposed as the work of that talented pasticheur, Michelangelo. It sounds, at first, utterly deranged. Yet Lynn Catterson told the Italian Academy at Columbia University she has a "mountain of evidence" proving Michelangelo faked the ancient sculpture and arranged for it to be discovered so he could profit from its sale...

...The fun starts when you see Laocoöns in Michelangelo's paintings and sculptures from before its discovery in 1506. In about 1494, when he was still a teenager, he carved The Battle of the Centaurs - a writhing, coiling tangle of limbs. The men and centaurs struggling in buttery marble have the sensuous abandon of a nest of snakes, and you can even see a figure who specifically resembles Laocoön.

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Battle of the Centaurs​

You can almost start to believe Michelangelo did forge the Laocoön, if it weren't for one depressing fact. In the Pergamon Museum in Berlin is the immense High Altar from the Greek city of Pergamon in Asia Minor. On its frieze is a passionate suffering figure with a wild face - obviously the model for the face of Laocoön. This kind of expressive, pathetic emotionalism became typical of later Greek art, in the Hellenistic style. Before the Pergamon altar was taken to Berlin by German archaeologists it was in Turkey. Michelangelo never went there. He cannot have forged the 400ft-long Pergamon frieze, or based the Laocoön on it. Amazingly enough, the Renaissance really did rediscover the masterpiece described by Pliny.

And there's another reason why the Laocoön can't be by Michelangelo. It's not good enough.

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• Is the Laocoön a fake by Michelangelo? (more interesting details in here)

In 1878, the German engineer Carl Humann started official excavations on the acropolis of Pergamon, an effort that lasted until 1886.

In Berlin, Italian restorers reassembled the panels comprising the frieze from the thousands of fragments that had been recovered. In order to display the result and create a context for it, a new museum was erected in 1901 on Berlin's Museum Island. Because this first Pergamon Museum proved to be both inadequate and structurally unsound, it was demolished in 1909 and replaced with a much larger museum, which opened in 1930. This new museum is still open to the public on the island.

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• Pergamon Altar - Wikipedia

In August 2020, while the Pergamon Museum was still closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic pandemic, Attila Hildmann described the altar as being the "centre of global satanists and Corona criminals". In October of the same year it was discovered several pieces in the museum were damaged while it was closed.

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