The Two Careers of Samuel Morse

Samuel F.B. Morse, Self-Portrait (1812 — he was 21)  National Portrait Gallery, Washington

We can only imagine what Jedidiah Morse thought when his son Samuel announced, “Dad, I’ve decided to become an artist.”  There is no historical record of how that conversation went, so we don’t know if the father snarled, “What!?  You have any idea what it cost to put you through Yale?  You were Phi Beta Kappa — and now you want to throw all that away?”

As an occupation, artist was not a common road to riches in early 19th-century America (still isn’t, for that matter).  Young Samuel Finley Breese Morse went off to study painting in England, though, and when he returned in 1815, he managed to support himself despite the widespread lack of interest in the kind of historical subjects he personally favored.

The only real market was portraits, and let’s give him credit — Morse cranked out good ones.  He painted former president John Adams and was commissioned to do a portrait of president James Monroe, as well as Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette.  By 1826, Morse had become the presiding officer of the National Academy of Design.

Jedidiah Morse died that same year, and he probably went out saying to anyone who would listen, “Didn’t I tell you my son had talent?  I always knew he’d make me proud.”  What dad never knew was that his son would gain far greater fame, but not as an artist.

Samuel went back to Europe in 1830 to sharpen his painting skills, but on the return voyage in 1832, Morse met a fellow passenger who was talking about electromagnetism.  Those conversations inspired Morse; he saw the possibility of using pulses of electric current to send messages over wires.

It isn’t quite accurate to say that Samuel F.B. Morse invented the telegraph, since crude versions of it had been around for almost a hundred hears.  In 1746, for example, a French scientist named Nollet got a couple hundred monks into a giant circle and wired them together.  When he discharged electricity from Leyden jars, those monks got the shocking message.

Anyway, Morse did come up with his single-wire telegraph in the mid-1830s, but the challenge was getting a signal to travel more than a few hundred yards.  He got help on that from New York University chemistry professor Leonard Gale; Morse was teaching art at NYU at the time.  Gale and Morse figured out how to put relays into the system, allowing telegraphic impulses to be sent over long distances.

Those signals were developed into a code so that their meaning could be interpreted.  Morse worked on this with a machinist named Alfred Vail.  Historians agree that Morse never, ever said, “I couldn’t have done it without you, Alfred.  Let’s call it ‘The Vail Code’ .”

The first public demonstration of Morse’s telegraph was on May 24, 1844, when a message was sent from the Supreme Court chamber in Washington, D.C., to a train station in Baltimore.  Morse tapped out “What hath God wrought?”, perhaps the only time he shared credit for the invention of the telegraph.

Ten years later there were 23,000 miles of telegraph wire in operation.  Samuel Morse’s second career secured his place in history.  His first career had ended in 1837; he never completed another painting in the remaining 35 years of his life.

Pain in Paint

Pablo Picasso, “Guernica” (1937) Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid

Picasso is overrated.

Most of the art establishment would consider that statement heresy; their esteem for him matches his attitude about himself. Some authorities regard Pablo Picasso as the greatest artist since Michelangelo, to which I say, “Oh, please.”

As I have admitted before, I’m no expert, but I have stood in front of a lot of works by Picasso in a lot of museums. There are a lot of Picassos to see, by the way: His total output exceeds 30,000 works.

That astonishing number is due in part to the fame he enjoyed over his long life; Picasso could sneeze into a napkin and collectors would proclaim it a masterpiece. He’d dash off a painting or collage just about daily, some of which were quite good… but there were plenty that weren’t so hot. At least, they weren’t vastly superior to the work of his colleagues like Georges Braque.

Picasso enhanced his reputation by figuring out how to “work the room” in the art community. He systematically befriended critics, dealers, other artists, and writers who helped advance his career. That’s not to say that he was without artistic talent; clearly he had it. But some of the Picasso phenomenon sprang from his shrewd calculations about how to use associates for personal gain.

Down through the centuries there have been many artists who weren’t exactly lovable — Caravaggio, just to name one — so what we know about their personal lives probably shouldn’t influence our appreciation of their work.

However, having seen a generous sampling of Picasso’s work (much of which hadn’t enthralled me) and knowing a bit about his character (or lack thereof) I was surprised by my reaction to his celebrated painting “Guernica”. I hadn’t expected to be moved by it, but I was.

Like you, I’d seen reproductions of the painting, but finally came face-to-face with it, so to speak, in Madrid. It’s housed in a modern-art museum popularly known as the Reina Sofia, named for Spain’s current queen.

Guernica (pronounced GARE-nee-kuh) is a town in northern Spain that, in 1937, became the subject of an experiment in wartime brutality. Francisco Franco, Spain’s dictator at the time, gave his fellow fascist Adolf Hitler the go-ahead to attack the town with a saturation-bombing raid. Hundreds — perhaps thousands — of civilians died.

Picasso was in Paris at the time, doing preliminary work on a mural he had been commissioned to paint for an international exposition. Outraged at the news of what had happened in Guernica, he scrapped a tableau of flamenco dancers (or whatever he originally intended to do) and launched into the epic anti-war painting instead.

It’s quite large, something like 11′x25′. “Guernica” is not a representation of the historical event, but the Cubist style — fragments randomly reassembled — conveys the destructive effect of the bombing. (Click on the picture to enlarge it.)

The individual images within the painting are emotionally powerful: On the left, a mother sobs with her dead baby in her arms. Another woman, on the right edge, seems to be trapped in rubble, screaming for help. In the foreground is a dead fighter; he is still clutching a broken sword.

The unbearable pain of the tragedy is evident.

I’m still not a huge fan of Pablo Picasso in general, but I greatly admire this particular painting. Somehow the bombs that hit Guernica also ignited the conscience of an artist not known for having one.

Venus on the Half Shell

Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (c. 1482) Uffizi Gallery, Florence

One of the most popular subjects for medieval artists was the Virgin Mary with a little old man sitting on her lap.

Many of these paintings are entitled Madonna and child, but next time you’re in an art museum, see if you think it looks like a child.  Nope — that baby appears to be your department-store tailor, but he’s naked.

By the time of the Renaissance, artists were generally more skillful at painting babies that looked like babies, and the scope of their subject matter had broadened.  But some of it is still pretty strange.

Consider the work of Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510), who could paint a reasonably lifelike baby, but is far more renowned for a very different nativity scene:  It’s called The Birth of Venus.

The image is so familiar, it may not seem peculiar anymore.  It is based on the ancient myth of Venus emerging, full-grown, from the sea.  On the left, Zephyr and Aura are blowing a gentle breeze; on the right of the picture, another goddess offers Venus a beach cover-up.

Even though the central figure is discreet about her nudity, there was still plenty of shock value to that pose in the 1480s.  Females depicted without clothing hadn’t been in favor with church authorities for several centuries.

The Medici family ruled Florence, though, and they were interested in the philosophy and art of ancient Greece and Rome.  They gave Botticelli many commissions, including The Birth of Venus, and the painting is clearly based on a pose from classical sculpture.

It’s odd, though, that this sculptural pose has a sort of weightless quality, a lack of mass, you might say — almost as if Venus is floating on air, not on a seashell.  Incidentally, I wouldn’t recommend standing in this Venus pose.  The center of gravity is so far left, you’d fall down.

We don’t know if that happened to the young woman who modeled for Botticelli, but art historians do believe that she was Simonetta Vespucci, a cousin of Amerigo Vespucci.  If that name sounds familiar, he was the explorer and cartographer for whom America is named.

Anyway, the aristocrats of Florence admired Boticelli’s painting and read all sorts of philosophical, religious and political meanings into it.  Then a stern Dominican friar named Savonarola stirred up popular opinion against… well, all sorts of things, including the Medici and their “pagan” finery.

In 1495 and 1498, Savonarola oversaw bonfires to consume these “vanities”, including a lot of paintings.  Some of them were probably by Botticelli, but The Birth of Venus survived because the Medici had stashed it in an undisclosed location.

Following that turmoil, Botticelli’s subject matter changed back to standard religious (rather than mythological) themes.  He doesn’t seem to have produced much of anything after 1500, and was pretty much forgotten until he was rediscovered in the 19th century.

One of Botticelli’s later paintings sold at auction recently (Jan. 30) for $10.4 million.  It is a work referred to in art circles as the Rockefeller Madonna.  I know what you’re thinking, but no — it’s called that because it was once owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  It’s not because the baby on her lap looks like a naked little tycoon.

The Poet and the Painting

“Landscape With the Fall of Icarus”, attributed to Pieter Brueghel (c. 1560) — Musee des Beaux Arts, Brussels

When you visit an art museum, a comment you’ll often overhear is “what time are we supposed to be back on the bus?”  Other popular topics include the lines for the rest rooms and the prices in the cafeteria.

Occasionally, though, I’ve heard museum visitors say stuff about the art they were seeing that was so perceptive I’ve wanted to high-five them.  The poet W.H. Auden had one of those brilliant insights, expressed in a poem he wrote in the late 1930s.  It’s called Musée des Beaux Arts.

That’s the name of a museum in Brussels, Belgium; it houses a quirky painting that until recently was attributed to the 16th-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Elder.  Its title is “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”.  (Click on the picture above to enlarge it.)

You probably remember the Greek myth about Icarus, whose father Daedalus made wings for himself and his son.  Wax was a component of the wings, and when Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax melted and Icarus plummeted into the sea.

If a painting is titled, say, “Madonna and Child”, it’s not unreasonable to assume that the composition will prominently include Mary and the baby.  That’s one of the odd things about the Icarus painting, though:  He’s not the central figure.  In fact, you have to look closely at the painting to see Icarus at all.  In the lower right corner of the picture, his flailing legs are sticking out of the water.

Everyone else in the painting is oblivious to this guy who has fallen from the sky and is drowning.  So Auden, who apparently visited the Museum of Fine Arts in 1938, stood in front of this painting and thought, “Hmm.  What was the artist trying to convey with this peculiar composition?”  For that matter, he wondered what other artists were communicating when they depicted people and animals around the margins who were seemingly missing nearby miraculous events.  Here’s what Auden realized…

Musée des Beaux Arts

 About suffering they were never wrong,                                                                      The Old Masters:  how well they understood                                                               Its human position; how it takes place                                                                    While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking                    dully along;                                                                                                                      How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting                                        For the miraculous birth, there always must be                                               Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating                                       On a pond at the edge of the wood:                                                                            They never forgot                                                                                                            That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course                                   Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot                                                                   Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse          Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away                          Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may                                             Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,                                                                     But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone                                       As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green                                  Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen                      Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,                                                     Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Still Modern

Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) — Museum of Modern Art, New York

When an artist began painting pictures of horses and bison on the walls of his cave during the Paleolithic era, reaction was probably mixed.  Some cavemen preferred the more traditional depictions of animals, scratched into the dirt around the campfire.  Others were captivated by this new approach — “It’s very modern,” they told each other.

Using paint on walls didn’t stay modern very long; the next new thing was decorating one’s cave with flocked wallpaper.  OK, that part isn’t true, but you get my point:  “modern” is usually construed to mean up-to-date; characteristic of present time; contemporary.  The general idea is that something modern is relatively new, and therefore good.  That’s until something even better is introduced and becomes the new version of modern.

In the 1400s, the Renaissance was modern art — it was quite different than medieval art.  A couple of centuries later, Caravaggio and other Baroque artists came along with their untraditional approaches; like that cave painter they scandalized some critics, but made others say, “Wow, that’s cool.”  It was the modern art of the 17th century.  Until it was Rococo’s turn to be modern, and so on.

As you are undoubtedly aware, though, there are a number of art museums around the world that refer to their collections as modern.  The best-known is the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, which has several paintings that I happen to know are over a hundred years old.  So what’s the deal with that?  Shouldn’t they throw out all that old stuff and get art that’s more modern?

Well, no.  That’s because art historians have applied the designation Modern to art in a way that doesn’t exactly correspond to the dictionary definition of modern.  To them, it generally means art created between the mid-19th century and 1970 or so.

Scholars have differing opinions on when Modern Art began:  Some say 1863, with Edouard Manet’s scandalous painting Dejeuner sur l’Herbe.  Others point to the Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Degas) or the Post-Impressionists (Gauguin, van Gogh, Cezanne) as being the founders of Modern Art.  They all agree that by the time Pablo Picasso was producing paintings that looked like broken pottery, the era of Modern Art was upon us.

The 20th century brought not only Cubism, but Fauvism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and so many other “ism”s that critics and historians threw up their hands and lumped them all together as Modern Art.  What many of those movements have in common is a return to a less refined, more primitive style — not unlike the cave paintings of long ago.  The very old became new again.

Professor H.H. Arnason said that the modern approach to painting was to no longer create works that were “imitations of nature”, but that the painting “became a reality in itself, not an imitation of anything else; it had its own laws and its own reasons for existence.”

After Modern Art came Contemporary Art, which is the phase we’re in now.  It dates back to approximately a month after your birthday in 1983, depending on which scholar’s opinion you choose to accept.

The dictionary says that contemporary means the present time.  So what comes next?  What will we call art that’s produced when Contemporary is no longer in the present?  I say we hit the reset button, and call art created after New Year’s Eve “Prehistoric”.

Never Heard of Him

Joaquin Sorolla, “A La Sombra de la Barca, Valencia” (1903-04) — Museo Sorolla, Madrid

On our way into the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, a tourist near us showed his admission ticket to his companion.  Printed on the stub was one of Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers.  The man said to his friend, “This is the picture over our kitchen sink.  It’s a copy.”

That clarification seemed unnecessary, but a hundred years ago it would have been possible to put an original Van Gogh over one’s kitchen sink.  Critics and art dealers didn’t decide his work was worth owning until the early 20th century, so Vincent missed out on the lavish acclaim that has been heaped on his work since.  There have been other artists — Paul Cezanne, just to name one — for whom success also came posthumously.

On the other hand, there are painters who were widely admired during their lifetimes, but were consigned to obscurity afterward.  You may be familiar with the work of an 18th-century genre and still-life painter named Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, who was King Louis XV’s favorite artist.  Chardin has been forgotten and then rediscovered a couple of times, most recently in the mid-20th century.  In case you’re keeping score, he is currently considered a genius.

An artist whose work I recently stumbled upon (and they should be more careful about putting stuff where you can stumble on it) is a Spanish painter named Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida.  He is more commonly known as Joaquin Sorolla — but it may be stretching a point to say that he is “commonly known”.  Have you ever heard of Sorolla?

Until a year or so ago I hadn’t, but our friend Susie tipped us off before a visit to Madrid, where he still seems to have a following.

An orphan at the age of two, Sorolla showed early promise as an artist and by his late 20s — in the 1890s — he was receiving international acclaim.  In the early 20th century, exhibitions of his work were garnering praise and generating commissions, including a portrait of the U.S. president, William Howard Taft, that was painted in the White House.

Sorolla’s portraits have a lot of charm, but he was equally adept at landscape and genre painting.  There was a lot of sunshine in his palette, and my favorite works by Sorolla are scenes at the edge of the ocean, many painted on the beach at Valencia.

Sorolla’s style might be characterized as somewhere between Realism and Impressionism, more loosely rendered than the paintings of his friend John Singer Sargent, whose reputation has lasted longer.

Soon after Sorolla’s death in 1923, his fame began to decline.  In the art world, immortality doesn’t always last forever.  It’s probably not a coincidence that Van Gogh’s reputation soared around the same time that Sorolla’s receded, because critics and the public were chasing after the next new thing, which at that time was Post-Impressionism.

It doesn’t seem likely that Van Gogh’s fame will vanish, since there are so many reproductions of his work over kitchen sinks.  It would be nice, though, if the world rediscovers Joaquin Sorolla — that guy could paint.

Let Your Eyes Ascend

Sistine Chapel Ceiling (detail) — Vatican Museums

“Shhhh!”

It had never before occurred to me that the sound that demands silence is understood in all languages.  A guard in the Sistine Chapel was enforcing the No Talking rule and hundreds of tourists instantly complied — for a few seconds.  Then the buzz  began again, as we all stared in amazement at one of history’s monumental artistic achievements.

Michelangelo rightly considered himself more of a sculptor than a painter, which is one reason he was reluctant to accept the commission (demand) of Pope Julius II to come to Rome and paint the ceiling of this building.  It had originally been built in the 1470s at the behest of Pope Sixtus IV.  The involvement of Sixtus is why it’s known as the Sistine Chapel, in case you were wondering.

The building had undergone some renovations due to structural flaws; Michelangelo started in on the new ceiling in 1508.  There were problems:  For one thing, he had relatively little experience with fresco.  That technique involves applying paint to wet plaster, so the artist and his assistants had to estimate how much plaster they thought they could paint before the surface dried.

Another issue was even more basic:  How do you work on a large horizontal surface that is 60 feet above the floor?  The easiest approach would have been to build scaffolding towers, but the pope and cardinals wanted the floor to be clear so they could continue holding their meetings in the chapel.

Michelangelo figured out a way to bolt the scaffolding into the side walls; he and his assistants climbed up to their perch and did that marvelous work while leaning backward.  The first half of the ceiling — the eastern side — was completed in 1510.

When that scaffolding was taken down, Michelangelo was dissatisfied with the result.  There were too many figures in the panels, he felt; from the floor they appeared small.  When you visit the Sistine Chapel, you’ll notice that the figures in the other end, starting with the iconic “Creation of Adam”, are larger.

You’ll also notice that it’s not easy to find a spot from which to view the ceiling; you have to tip your head back to the point of toppling over.  Other tourists around you are pointing up to the ceiling, a gesture that I felt was unnecessary.  Seriously — if you’re in the Sistine Chapel, you really don’t need to be shown that there are paintings on the ceiling.

There are also paintings on the walls, including some by eminent artists like Boticelli and Ghirlandaio, who was Michelangelo’s teacher.  By far the most impressive wall painting, though, is the massive “Last Judgment” behind the altar on the west end, which took Michelangelo several more years to complete.  In total, he did over 12,000 square feet of fresco in the Sistine Chapel.  When you see it you can’t help but exclaim, in spite of the guards’ best efforts to shush you.

If you’re planning a visit, it’s helpful to know that in addition to the prohibition against talking, no photography is permitted in the Sistine Chapel.  And, as the website of the Vatican Museums says, access to the Sistine Chapel “is permitted only to visitors dressed appropriately.”  In other words, they won’t admit people who are exposing shoulders or knees into a room full of paintings of naked saints and sinners.

Women’s Work

Madame Vigee Le Brun and Her Daughter (self-portrait, 1789) — Le Louvre, Paris

From antiquity until about the 19th century, the involvement of women in art might be summarized as “clothing optional”.  Women mostly served as models, expected to maintain their dignity even while holding ridiculous poses.

Creating art was considered to be the province of men; for the most part, women were not permitted to hold a palette or a chisel.  There were some exceptions down through the centuries — there were indeed women who established themselves as artists — but unless you were an Art History major, you’ve probably never heard of any of them.

So let’s start by giving some credit to a man, a relatively minor painter named Orazio Gentileschi, who recognized and encouraged his daughter’s talent way back in the early 17th century.  Artemisia Gentileschi painted in the Baroque style to great effect.  Trust me — if you’re wandering through the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and come across her painting called “Judith Slaying Holofernes”, you’ll stop and say “Whoa!”  Her contemporaries (men) acknowledged the quality of her work; Artemisia was the first woman accepted into the Florence Art Academy, which was a big deal.

You’ll see Artemisia Gentileschi’s name in art books, but if you come across the name Le Brun at all, it usually refers to Charles Le Brun.  King Louis XIV called him “the greatest French artist of all time,” an assessment that now seems as over-the-top as Louis’s pet project, Versailles. 

The Le Brun I find interesting, however, is Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun (her husband’s great uncle was Charles Le Brun).  Elisabeth’s father was an artist of no repute, but he taught her a bit about painting before he died of complications from choking on a fishbone. 

Her mother subsequently married a jeweler in 1768 and the family moved into a neighborhood near the Royal Palace in Paris.  Elisabeth got to know her aristocratic neighbors, and they got to know her work.  By the age of 15, she was making good money painting their portraits.

That brought her to the attention of authorities who threatened her with arrest for painting without a license.  Makes you wonder what one had to do to qualify for an artist’s license, doesn’t it?  And were the ID pictures on artist’s licenses as awful as the pictures on driver’s licenses are now?

Well, let’s jump ahead to 1778, when Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun painted a portrait of the queen, Marie Antoinette.  Over the next several years, Elisabeth was commissioned to paint something like 30 portraits of Marie Antoinette, and lots more of other members of the nobility.

Then the French Revolution happened.

Madame Vigée Le Brun got out of France with her head still attached and continued painting aristocrats in other European cities.  She eventually returned to Paris, where she died in 1842.

To be honest, I’m not a big fan of her work, which is in the Rococo style.  As I may have mentioned before, the fussy sentimentality of Rococo tends to trigger my gag reflex.  In spite of that, I admire the technical skill with which she handled her brushes, and I think it’s worth calling attention to artists like Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, whose success helped open doors for generations of women artists who followed.

Monet’s Garden

This is how it looked on an overcast day.

You may not know you have, but you have definitely seen them.  It’s not possible you have lived this long without seeing some version of water lilies painted by Claude Monet.

He produced something like 250 paintings of nymphéas, as they are known in French, and these works can be found in museums from Tokyo to Toledo.  They also appear on towels and calendars and keychains and cocktail napkins.  Monet’s water lilies may not be as instantly recognizable as the “Mona Lisa” or Michelangelo’s “David”, but I’d guess they are almost as widely reproduced.

The models for all those paintings were in a pond on Monet’s property at Giverny, a village about 50 miles west of Paris.  He and his wife and kids lived in a rented house there beginning in 1883; his increasing wealth enabled him to buy the house in 1890, when he soon began improving the grounds.

Monet read up on plants and designed an expansive garden.  There is a Japanese bridge in it — you’ve seen those paintings, too (for a reminder, squint at photo above).  Then there’s the pond that is home to the water lilies, which are probably the best known of Monet’s “series paintings”.

He’d had the inspiration to paint the same subject at different times of day and with different points of view.  The west facade of Rouen Cathedral was thoroughly explored in one series, and haystacks in the countryside near Giverny got a similar treatment.

According to art historian H.H. Arnason, Monet’s approach was “an attempt to capture the ephemeral aspects of a changing moment.”  In a way, it was like painting time-lapse pictures — each canvas was sort of a still-frame from a movie (or I guess nowadays we’d call it a “vidcap”).

Especially in the last years of his life, Monet’s garden was his subject matter.  He’d walk out of his house, set up his easel and start painting what he saw:  the garden, the bridge, the pond with its water lilies.

If you’re a fan of his work, Giverny might be a pilgrimage site for you, because Monet’s house and garden are still there.  They are diligently maintained by a staff that follows the instructions Monet wrote for his gardeners a hundred years ago.

It’s an easy side trip from Paris:  Catch a train at Gare St-Lazare, a station that Monet painted on several occasions.  It takes less than an hour to get to the town of Vernon; from the train station in Vernon, there’s a bus that will take you the 4 miles to Giverny.

None of Monet’s original paintings are in the house, but if you’re still wondering what his paintings of water lilies look like, try the gift shop, or anyplace around the village.  Trust me, it’s about as hard as trying to find baseball-related souvenirs in Cooperstown, where baseball’s Hall of Fame is located.

If you can’t find a Monet reproduced on a coffee mug or an apron or something here… well, just hold out a handful of Euros and it will find you.

Ancient Nightmares

Laocoon Group, Vatican Museums

When you were a student, did you ever have a nightmare that the final test for some class was that day, and you hadn’t studied for it?  Yeah, me too.

  Friends who are actors have told me about a similar bad dream that is common to their profession:  they are about to go on stage and don’t know any of their lines.

There are other nightmares that are not occupation-specific, but are widespread.  There’s the one about feeling lost or trapped; there’s that awful one about falling; being chased or attacked is another common one.  And of course there is the nightmare in which you are naked in public.  (For all I know, strippers may have the opposite nightmare — a stuck zipper prevents them from getting naked in public.)

Any one of those is bad enough, but consider the multiple nightmares of the famous sculpture known as The Laocoön Group.

The central figure is a guy named Laocoön (pronounced Lay-AWK-oh-on), who, according to legend, was a Trojan priest.  He had already annoyed the gods with some misdeed, but then he suppposedly warned Troy against taking in that wooden horse left on the doorstep by the Greeks.  For that he was punished by either Apollo or Poseidon, depending on whose version of the story you accept.

Even a brief glance at this large marble sculpture makes clear what form the punishment took, and what constitutes the most obvious nightmare:  Laocoön and his sons were crushed by two giant sea serpents.  Yikes!

The sculpture group is attributed to three collaborators from the Greek island of Rhodes — Agesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus.  Most scholars date it to the first century B.C., but about a hundred years later it showed up in Pliny the Elder’s inventory of stuff at the palace of the Roman emperor Titus.

How did it get from Rhodes to Rome?  That’s unknown, but that was Laocoön nightmare #2:  “Huh?  Where am I?  How did I get here?”  And then… he disappeared until 1506, when the sculpture group was dug up in a vineyard, where it had apparently been buried for many centuries.  Tell me that’s not a nightmare.

Pope Julius II sent Michelangelo out to have a look at the statue as it was being unearthed; the artist reported back, “Wow!” (in Italian, of course).  So the pope said to the man who found Laocoön, “How much you want for it?”

Soon thereafter, the sculpture group was relocated to the Vatican; Laocoön and sons now find themselves naked in church — nightmare!  When they were discovered, each of the figures was missing arms or hands, and over the centuries since 1506, various artists have attached replacement parts (they’re-experimenting-with-me nightmare).

After his conquest of Italy in 1799, Napoleon had The Laocoön Group carted off to Paris (that could be the nightmare about being chased or attacked).  The British removed it from the Louvre in 1816 and returned it to the Vatican.

That’s where we encountered Laocoön and sons some years ago.  Their tortured expressions are all the more memorable because of the contrast with other sculptures from antiquity, most of which have faces so serene, they look like they never had a nightmare.  Of course, even if those Hellenistic statues hadn’t studied, it was a lot easier to bluff your way through the Chemistry final back then because there were only, what, four elements:  earth, air, fire and — wait, give me a second, I know this…