{"id":4442,"date":"2006-11-22T11:55:49","date_gmt":"2006-11-22T11:55:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/laocoon.html"},"modified":"2006-11-22T11:55:49","modified_gmt":"2006-11-22T11:55:49","slug":"laocoon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/laocoon.html","title":{"rendered":"Laocoon"},"content":{"rendered":"

An anniversary:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

On a cold January morning in 1506, a spectacular marble statue was unearthed in a hillside vineyard in central Rome. <\/p>\n

The sculptural group depicted Laocoon, a Trojan high priest, and his two sons being strangled by a sea snake — divine punishment for having warned the city of Troy not to accept the Trojan horse. <\/p>\n

Artists of Renaissance Rome, including Michelangelo, flocked to the site and immediately recognized the discovery as a famous work by Hellenistic sculptors. According to the ancient Roman historian Pliny, it had once decorated the home of the Emperor Titus. <\/p>\n

Pope Julius II, an art lover, immediately dispatched an expert to take a look. A month later, the pope bought the work and had it transferred to the Vatican, where it became the centerpiece of a "courtyard of statues." <\/p>\n

Eventually, the papal collection grew into the Vatican Museums, which today house about 150,000 works of art. The name is "museums" because the Vatican’s art and artifacts are divided into more than 25 different collections and architectural areas, ranging from Egyptian to modern times. <\/p>\n

This year, the Vatican Museums are celebrating their 500th anniversary with a special exhibit on the Laocoon and its fascinating story. The statue survived the sack of Rome in 1529 but was taken to Paris by Napoleon in the late 1700s and, on the return trip to Rome years later, was dropped and broke into several pieces. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An anniversary: On a cold January morning in 1506, a spectacular marble statue was unearthed in a hillside vineyard in central Rome. The sculptural group depicted Laocoon, a Trojan high priest, and his two sons being strangled by a sea snake — divine punishment for having warned the city of Troy not to accept the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nLaocoon - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/11\/laocoon.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Laocoon - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An anniversary: On a cold January morning in 1506, a spectacular marble statue was unearthed in a hillside vineyard in central Rome. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4442\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}