Each installment of Strike a Pose features one of art history’s most seminal postures. Mediums range from sculpture to oils and everything in between. (See all installments.)

This week we discuss the meaning behind one that sacrificed naturalism for the sake of expression: Serpentine (explore the corresponding playlist).

Art history tends to be fluid. There are monumental shifts, periods of whiplash change, reversals of opinions—but still, each era leads into the next. This is because art is academic. Styles and techniques are passed down from teachers to students (who then become the teachers). Rarely do we find a sort of quantum leap, where a work from the past goes unnoticed only to be discovered later, its impact delayed by centuries, millennia. But this is exactly what happened in the curious case of Laocoön and His Sons (c. 40–30 B.C.), Michelangelo, Mannerism, and the Serpentine pose.

In the winter of 1506, on a Roman vineyard, a sculpture was discovered. It was Laocoön and His Sons, and it came from Hellenistic Greece, 1500 years in the past. Even before it was fully removed from the earth, Michelangelo was on scene. (The story goes that the Pope, Julius II, asked the architect Giuliano da Sangallo to head to the excavation site; Michelangelo was his friend and a frequent visitor to his house.) Michelangelo was in awe and invigorated—he couldn’t wait to start studying it. It wasn’t like anything he or any of his contemporaries had seen before. Its features were exaggerated, more so than anything in existence, starting with its contorted torso and ending with its anguished face. This was a revelation for the day’s artists; they didn’t even know a body could express such dramatic instability. (It even put to shame the monumental contrapposto, which seemed muted in comparison.) This was partly because it was unrealistic and unnatural. In day-to-day life, you’d hardly witness someone in such a pose: legs one way, torso and arms the other, head reared back into view.

It quickly became the talk of the art world. Pliny the Elder declared it the most beautiful artwork of all time. Debates raged about how to interpret it, and how it might influence the course of art. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote that the face shouldn’t portray real anguish, as that would be too sad for the general public; it should be expressive while still retaining beauty. Not everyone agreed. What isn’t up for debate is its influence, starting with Michelangelo, one of the most influential artists of his (and all) time; the pose can be seen throughout his paintings on the ceiling, including that of the Sistine Chapel. And of course it didn’t stop there, its influence quickly bleeding from the world of sculpture to that of painting. In fact, in painting Serpentine found an (arguably) more suitable home—the medium being inherently less tied down by an instinct for realism. The Serpentine pose (also called figura serpentinata) can be seen in the work of Agnolo Bronzino, El Greco, Titian, along with many others.

Like many of art history’s most influential works, Laocoön and His Sons didn’t just show artists what could be done, it gave them permission to explore. The pose was exaggerated and expressive, and so expanded ideas of what art could be. In the wake of Michelangelo, da Vinci, and Raphael came an influx of artists seeking to build upon art history in surprising ways; this movement came to be known as Mannerism. Bridging the end of the High Renaissance with the beginning of the Baroque period, Mannerism championed a distortion of Renaissance values. Ideals of beauty and proportion were stretched to the point of tension. Mannerists were sophisticated, drawn to asymmetry, and unafraid to find elegance in unusual places.

The movement owed much of its output to competition. The period’s artists, studying Renaissance masters while under the spell of Hellenistic influences, each tried forging their own style. Artists became known for their individual proclivities, as opposed to their contribution to a more coherent style. It is for this reason that historians still debate whether to classify Mannerism as a style, movement, or period.

It’s hard to say whether Laocoön and His Sons and the Serpentine pose helped start a new movement, or if it just precipitated something that was inevitable. (This question could be asked about many of art history’s most influential works.) It’s also tempting to wonder what would have happened if it was unearthed 50 years earlier, 100 years, 500. What’s for certain is that its discovery couldn’t have happened at a better time. The world of art was ready to challenge itself, put its penchant for perfection on trial. So it isn’t really that art history lost all of those years that Laocoön and His Sons laid hidden. It might better to think of that millennium and a half as a time when the sculpture was just waiting for the world to be ready for it.