My father, Richard Rampell, was a photographer who used to exhibit his artsy black and white pictures in Manhattan’s top photo galleries. Always a good provider, Dad supported our family by teaching at Boys High in Bed Stuy, explaining: “All artists require patrons.
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In January 1506, workmen digging foundations near the Baths of Titus discovered a buried sculptural group, undisturbed since antiquity. The Florentine sculptor Giuliano da Sangallo came to the site and authenticated the work: it was the Trojan priest of Apollo, Laocoön, and his twin sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus. As recounted in the second book of
The Aeneid, the men, in their struggle with sea serpents sent by Athena, are doomed. The unequaled virtuosity of this depiction of straining muscles and mortal passions was the achievement of a trio of Hellenistic sculptors from Rhodes: Polydoros, Agesandros and Athanadoros, whose work had been much praised in ancient times, notably by Pliny the Elder. The Laocoön sculptures were installed at the Vatican, and have since then remained a visible ideal of the highest artistic achievement. The work has been copied countless times. Baccio Bandinelli and his workshop executed a painstaking but dull copy in the 1520s. Michelang