…because I’m still obsessed:
Interested in that newly-on-display necropolis at the Vatican (the one near the Vatican museum entrance)?
This traveler has excellent photos from a recent visit.
Interested in the Christmas tree made of entirely of Murano glass that’s on display in Venice?
And don’t forget the Laocoön, cleaned up, and on special display at the Vatican Museum in honor of the 500th anniversary of the place. From Sandro Magister:
Laocoön was discovered during digging in a Roman vineyard, on a chilly morning in February of 1506.
Pope Julius II immediately sent to the spot his architect Giuliano da Sangallo and Michelangelo. And they had no doubts: this was the famous group of sculptures that Pliny the Elder had described after seeing it in the palace of Titus, the Roman emperor who destroyed Jerusalem in 70 A.D.
One month later, Laocoön was in the Vatican, at the pope’s behest: it was the first of a collection of masterpieces that would later become the pontifical museum. Dating to between 40 and 20 B.C., it was created by three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Athenedoros, Hegesandros, and Polydoros.
Laocoön was the priest of Troy who had guessed at the trick of the wooden horse by which the Greeks were about to take over the city. But before he was able to warn his fellow citizens, two serpents sent by the enemy gods killed him and his two sons.
From his sacrifice, then, stemmed the fall of Troy and the flight of Aeneas toward the coasts of Italy, where his descendents founded Rome: it is the saga that Virgil celebrates in the Aeneid.
As the founder of the new Christian Rome, pope Julius II therefore viewed the discovery of Laocoön as “providential.” He placed the statue in the Belvedere courtyard, on the highest part of the Vatican hill, in the new architectural complex designed by Bramante after the model of the Roman temple of Primeval Fortune in Palestrina. And he soon placed beside Laocoön other ancient masterpieces in his possession, including the Belvedere Apollo.
The statues had an extraordinary impact on the artists Julius II called to work in the Vatican – and also on many artists during the following centuries.
The prophet Jonah, who dominates the vault of the Sistine Chapel frescoed by Michelangelo, has his model in Laocoön.
And the Christ in the Universal Judgment also painted by Michelangelo has the body of Laocoön and the face of the Belvedere Apollo.
But it’s not just a matter of similarities of form. The classical art that breaks forth in Renaissance art reflects a vision of the Church that reconciles the people of God and the pagans, that places side by side the prophets of the Old Testament and the sibyls, that shows the great ancient thinkers walking toward the City of God. The “School of Athens” frescoed by Raphael in the Stanze Vaticane not only gathers the philosophers beneath the vaults of the new St. Peter’s Basilica under construction, but it places them before the “Disputation on the Sacrament”; even more, it seems to show them moving toward the altar with the consecrated host, the Trinity, and the earthly and heavenly Church.
The pagan Laocoön is an essential part of this vision of the Church.
Which is the same as that of Benedict XVI.
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