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 ...