A missing chunk of marble, a Renaissance rivalry, a 2,000-year-old silent scream, and a potential conspiracy involving one of history’s greatest artists all converge on a single sculpture: Laocoön and His Sons. This episode unpacks the nearly life-sized scene of a Trojan priest and his two sons crushed by sea serpents, the two opposing versions of the myth in Virgil and Sophocles, and the facial expression Darwin and Duchenne judged physiologically impossible.

We follow the statue from Pliny the Elder’s description of it in the palace of Titus, attributed to three Rhodian sculptors and supposedly carved from one block, through its rediscovery in a Roman vineyard in February 1506 with Michelangelo present. Michelangelo deduced from the shoulder muscles that the lost arm bent back toward the head; Raphael’s contest chose a heroic outstretched arm instead, and the statue was displayed that way for centuries until Ludwig Pollak found the original bent arm in a builder’s yard in 1905. We then weigh Lynn Catterson’s controversial theory that Michelangelo forged the whole thing, and the reactions of Titian, Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe, Ruskin, and Blake.

• Why the sculptor prioritized emotional truth over anatomical possibility
• Hellenistic Baroque and the stylistic link to the Pergamon Altar and Sperlonga
• Seven interlocking pieces, unexplained bank deposits, and the Sleeping Cupid scam
• Ruskin’s complaint that real constrictors do not behave like pieces of tape with heads
• Whether the story of where art comes from matters more than the art itself