Laocoön and His Sons
John Ruskin compared Michelangelo's "Brazen Serpent" scene favourably to the canonical classical statue group "Laocoön and His Sons", which Michelangelo saw on its discovery in 1506 together with Giuliano da Sangallo and his son. Both works are crowded compositions of figures attacked by supernatural reptiles: the "fiery serpents" of the "Book of Numbers" and the sea-monsters of Virgil's "Aeneid". But Ruskin preferred the sublimity expressed by Michelangelo's "gigantic intellect" in "the grandeur of the plague itself, in its multitudinous grasp, and its mystical salvation" and his "awfulness and quietness" to the "meagre lines and contemptible tortures of the Laocoön" and argued that "the grandeur of this treatment results, not merely from choice, but from a greater knowledge and more faithful rendering of truth". Attacking the sculpture's unnaturalistic snakes as "pieces of tape with heads to them" and criticizing the unrealistic struggle, he contrasts: