Kay Morgan

At first glance, this looks like nothing more than two lovers holding each other against a garden wall. But look at what her hands are doing... The painting is by John Everett Millais, and the scene is set in Paris, on a specific and terrible date: the 24th of August, 1572, the eve of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, when thousands of French Protestants, the Huguenots, were slaughtered in the streets by their Catholic countrymen. On that night, there was only one way for a man to be spared: if he tied a white cloth around his arm, a sign that he was a Catholic, the killers would pass him by. The man in this painting is a Huguenot. And the woman who loves him is desperately trying to save his life... she is winding a white band around his arm, gazing up at him, pleading with him to just wear it, to tell the small lie that will let him live and stay with her. But gently, without anger, he is stopping her. With one hand he loosens the cloth she is tying. He will not wear it. To wear it would be to deny his faith, to save his body by betraying his soul, and he cannot do it, not even for her, not even to live. Millais fills the scene signs of what is coming: she wears a ring, he wears none, a marriage that will never happen. And the two of them are pressed so close that you cannot tell, at a glance, whether this is an embrace or a struggle. It is both. It is a woman trying to hold a man in this world, and a man who has already made his peace with leaving it…

This is a statue of the only man in Troy who saw the trap. He tried to warn everyone, and this is what the gods did to him because of it... His name was Laocoön, a Trojan priest. When the Greek army vanished and left a giant wooden horse outside the city gates, all of Troy celebrated. Only Laocoön refused to believe it. He warned his people the horse was a trick and, to prove it was hollow, hurled his spear into its side. In Virgil's telling, he spoke a line that has outlasted almost everything else about Troy: "I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts." He was right. The horse was packed with soldiers, and Troy was hours from destruction. This sculpture shows what he got for it. Two enormous sea serpents rise out of the sea and coil around him and his young sons, dragging all three down together. The father's whole body is knotted in the struggle, every muscle straining, his face locked in a scream. The gods wanted Troy to fall, and Laocoön was in the way. The Trojans watched him die in agony and drew exactly the wrong conclusion: they decided the gods were punishing him for attacking a holy gift. So they pulled the horse inside their own walls, and that night, Troy burned... The statue is called Laocoön and His Sons. It is the work of three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes, Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, and dates to the Hellenistic period, making it well over two thousand years old. Buried for more than a thousand years, it was dug out of a Roman vineyard in 1506, and Michelangelo rushed across Rome to see it the day it was found. It has been called the single greatest depiction of human suffering in the history of art, but it endures because of what it is really about: the man who sees the truth, says it out loud, and is destroyed for being right while the crowd watches... It is one of the oldest patterns there is, and it has never stopped repeating. There is nothing new under the sun.