Laocoon and His Sons
Attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (active first century BC to first century AD) · About 40 to 30 BC, or a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original
A Trojan priest and his two sons are being crushed by two enormous sea serpents. Laocoon had warned his people not to trust the wooden horse the Greeks left on the beach, and the gods who favoured the Greeks sent the serpents to silence him. You see the exact moment of agony. His body twists away from a bite to the hip, his mouth opens in a cry, and the sons on either side reach out to a father who can no longer help them. The younger boy on the left is already collapsing.
Look at how the three bodies are bound together by the coils of the snakes into a single pyramid of struggle. Every muscle in the priest's torso is tensed, and the veins stand out on his arms. The sculptors carved the group so it is best seen from the front, like a stage scene, and the face was designed to be read from below. The right arm was missing when the statue was found and was restored for centuries in a straight, heroic pose. The original bent arm was rediscovered in a Roman stonemason's yard in nineteen hundred and six and was reattached in the nineteen fifties, which makes the figure more compact and more desperate.
The group was dug up in a vineyard on the Esquiline Hill in January fifteen hundred and six. Michelangelo went to watch the excavation, and Pope Julius the Second bought it within a month and placed it in this courtyard, which is where the Vatican Museums really begin. Pliny the Elder had praised a Laocoon by three Rhodian sculptors as the finest work of art in Rome, and the find seemed to bring a lost masterpiece back to life. It shaped the way Renaissance and Baroque artists thought about the body in pain, and it has stood here, apart from a few years in Napoleon's Paris, for more than five hundred years.
Did You Know? Michelangelo was present when the statue was unearthed in fifteen hundred and six, and the restored bent arm matches a suggestion he is said to have made.
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