The Most Famous Sculpture on Earth Had the Wrong ARM

For more than four centuries the most famous sculpture in the world was wearing the wrong arm — raised, straight, heroic, chosen by the leading artists of the Renaissance, who had considered the alternative and rejected it. The man who proposed the alternative was Michelangelo, and he was standing at the edge of the hole when the statue came out of the ground in 1506.

In 1906 an archaeologist spotted a bent marble arm in a builder's yard in Rome. It went into a Vatican storeroom for fifty years. When they finally tried it, a drill hole lined up perfectly.

⏱️ CHAPTERS
00:00 - The Wrong Arm
01:20 - Dug Up in a Roman Vineyard
03:30 - The Arm Nobody Could Agree On
05:30 - Found in a Builder's Yard
07:30 - It Was Never One Block
09:00 - The Face No Human Can Make
11:00 - Punished for Being Right, or for Being Wrong

📍 WHERE TO SEE IT Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican Museums, Vatican City. Booking in advance is strongly recommended.

📚 SOURCES Pliny the Elder, Natural History XXXVI; Francesco da Sangallo's letter of 1567; Paolo Liverani, Vatican Museums; Mary Beard on the Pollak arm; G. E. Lessing, Laocoön (1766); John Ruskin, Modern Painters.

Punished for being right, or punished for being wrong? The sculpture never says. Tell me which one you read.

#Laocoon #VaticanMuseums #AncientSculpture #ArtHistory