Art: Out of Tiberius' Cave

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Four and a half centuries have passed since Roman archaeologists uncovered the famed Laocoön sculpture, a huge, powerful work of marble showing the death of a Trojan priest and his two sons (who were sentenced by Athena to be crushed by serpents because Laocoön had warned against the Trojan horse). Placed in the Vatican, the Laocoön group profoundly impressed Michelangelo, and through him shaped the art of the High Renaissance. But even the Vatican experts have long believed that their Laocoön is only a copy of the original. Last week archaeologists the world over were excited by the possibility that the original Laocoön group, done about the time of Christ, had been found.

The discovery was made by a young Italian engineer named Erno Bellante, who was building a road past the town of Sperlonga (pop. 3,000) by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Taking time off from his prosaic work, Amateur Archaeologist Bellante set workmen to digging inside the grotto of Tiberius (who reigned from 14 A.D. to 37 A.D.), 90-ft.-deep cavern hard by the site of Tiberius' famed Villa Spelunca (Cave Villa).* Beneath six inches of limy earth, one of Bellante's men struck a marble fragment shaped like the calf of a human leg, about twice lifesize. The diggers dug on to more than 400 pieces of polished marble.

Called in to study the find Giulio Jacopi, director of Rome's Museo del Terme, a top archaeological authority, examined the fragments and made an excited announcement: on some of them he found the Greek inscription, "Done by Agesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus," the father and sons generally credited with the original Laocoön group. Said Jacopi: "That violently twisted neck . . . that great marble foot . . . the veins on that huge hand . . . the serpent is monstrous ... I believe it is Laocoön."

Only a third of the cave had been excavated by last week, and the torso of Laocoön himself was still among the missing pieces. To complicate matters, the citizens of Sperlonga were trying to keep the fragments in home ground. Thinking of tourist-trade possibilities, they rolled a five-ton rock before the cave entrance, dug a moat to frustrate approaching trucks. Still, having logic, culture and Cops all on his side, Jacopi was determined to get the entire cave excavated and the fragments transported to Rome, where they can be expertly examined and reassembled to determine whether they are, indeed, the original Laocoön.