My Laocoon: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks.

Richard Brilliant, My Laocoon: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks

Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2000. 162 pp. inc. 27 b/w illus. $45. ISBN: 0-520-21682-2.

At the moment of its excavation in a Roman vineyard Giuliano da Sangallo declared, "This is the Laocoon mentioned by Pliny." Since that day in 1506, the Vatican Laocoon group has been a prime subject of historiographic investigation. So many visual manifestations (primarily in the sixteenth century) and historical, literary, and philosophical texts have been derived from it, that the actual marbles can seem almost to be a museologized by-product of an ongoing intellectual tradition.

Richard Brilliant argues that the vicissitudes of the sculpture's periodization, stylistic analysis, meaning (as exemplum doloris), and even its qualitative value, are highly determined by cultural phenomena. In other words, the Laocoon problem is not merely contaminated by, but actually made up of, histories of philosophy and psychology; as well as histories of style, norms of physical restoration, and continuing archaeological finds. He is correct in his assertion that with an object so historically freighted the mere plausibility of, say, an iconographic interpretation, can never be entirely satisfactory; but rather that any such inquiry must open a fluid dialogue between past and present.

When Margarete Bieber wrote Lacocoon: The Influence of the Group Since its Rediscovery (1942, rev. 1967), she assumed a stance of historical objectivity. Whereas her study was meant to be definitive, Brilliant avoids historical conclusion in favor of the ever-renewing practices of interpretation, criticism, and intersubjectivity. His method is informed by the writings of assorted literary theorists such as E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for whom a single "meaning" may occur in the artist's mind, but "significance," which is far more interesting, changes, splits, and wanders throughout the course of history.

Brilliant delineates several Laocoons: the "normative" object discovered in 1506, restored in the sixteenth century and interpreted by Renaissance artists and writers; the subject of Johann Joachim Winckelmann's critical discourse, which was followed by those of Lessing and Goethe; the Laocoon of Margarete Bieber and Bernard Andreae, which took shape around Filippo Magi's restoration (1960) and the discovery of the Homeric sculpture groups at the "villa of Tiberius" at Sperlonga. This twentieth-century Laocoon has migrated away from its fellows at the Vatican Belvedere (Torso Belvedere; Apollo Belvedere), toward a different grouping composed of the fragments from Sperlonga, where the tentacles of Scylla have become eminently comparable with Laocoon's serpents, and historians have turned the Baxandallian "period eye" back again to antiquity. Pre-Renaissance Laocoons include the original sculpture described by Pliny and the hypothetical lost prototype of Andreae's reconstruction.

As these Laocoons act upon on each other, significance accumulates, and Brilliant shows that the question of original intention (Hirschian "meaning" versus "significance") becomes problematic. What, for example, were the intentions of Renaissance people when citing Pliny's Natural History? Or the aims of ancient Romans when "copying" the Greeks? The proverbial "lost Greek original" has long haunted the study of Roman statuary. That the historical search for a vanished original, or an ineffable ideal, may itself be a Platonic delusion, has received some attention (and is sure to receive more) by historians of ancient art. Such questions are significant.

Inevitably My Laocoon will be compared to Salvatore Settis's Laocoonte: Fama e stile (Rome, 1999). Each book deals with historiography, "alternative claims", and "other Laocoons." Settis moves easily from the histories of Rhodian workshops to Duchenne-Boulogne's photographs of electrical stimulation of facial muscles made to "verify" Laocoon's expression of pain. But whereas Settis aims to follow the labyrinths of interpretations without being caught in them and to ultimately extricate the work of art from its interpretive fortunes, Brilliant prefers to implicate the physical object in the trajectory of its own critical discourse. Renaissance scholars will enjoy Brilliant's Laocoon as a study of the hermeneutics of interpretation, but they will also need to turn to Settis's book with its definitive appendix of sixteenth-century texts on the Laocoon edited and translated (into Italian) by Sonia Maffei.

One problem with My Laocoon is the index, in which most of the references to page numbers in the "Notes" are incorrect; this is a considerable flaw in a book so rich with citations and without a bibliography.