Renaissance Recovery of the Roman Past:
After the return of the Popes from Avignon to Rome in 1420, the city grew and expanded. Extensive new building and construction on the original seven hills led to the digging up of many of the most famous ancient statues that we know of today, including the Laocoon, now in the Vatican. This statue had been in the Palace of the Flavian Emperor Titus, and showed the Trojan priest, Laocoon, who tried to warn the city against the Greek’s “gift” of the Trojan horse. He and his sons were attacked and killed by serpents sent against them by the gods/goddesses who were supporting the Greeks in their conquest of Troy. The statue was excavated after 1400 years underground. The excitement of the writer is key to what the Renaissance meant, particularly in Rome.

1506 Discovery of the Laocoon

Letter written in 1566, 60 years later, by Francesco da Sangallo, son of the famous architect Giuliano Sangallo, describing this event. Both father and son were present at the scene of discovery, along with Michelangelo.

“The first time I was in Rome when I was very young, the Pope [Julius II] was told about the discoveryof some very beautiful statues in a vineyard near Santa Maria Maggiore [on the Esquiline Hill]. The pope ordered one of his officers to run and tell Giuliano da Sangallo to go and see them. He set off immediately. Since Michelangelo Buonarroti was always to be found 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 the hole wider so that 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 [ancient statues owned by the Medici] in Florence."

Letter of Francesco da Sangallo, quoted in Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aestheticsin the Making of Renaissance Culture (1999), p. 3

Here is the quote from classical Roman writer Pliny's Natural History the 1st C AD Latin text by which all educated Renaissance men had learned about the Laocoon (without having ever seen it until the above event in 1506).

“The reputations of some works of art has been obscured by the number of artists engaged with them on a single task, because no indiviual monopolizes the credit nor again can several of them be named on equal terms. This is the case with the Laocoon in the palace of Titus [Flavian dynasty], a work superior to any painting and any bronze. Laocoon, his children, and the wonderful clasping coils of the snakes were carved from a single block [of marble] in accordance with an agreed plan by those eminent craftsmen, Hagesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, all of Rhodes."