Laocoön

Laocoön. An antique marble group (Vatican Mus.) representing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons being crushed to death by serpents as a penalty for warning the Trojans against the wooden horse of the Greeks, an incident related by Virgil in the Aeneid ii. 199–231. It is usually dated to the 2nd or 1st century bc or the 1st century ad, although whether it is an original Hellenistic piece or a Roman copy has long been a matter of dispute. Pliny states that in his time it stood in the palace of the Emperor Titus in Rome, records that it was made by the sculptors Hagesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus of Rhodes, and describes it as ‘a work to be preferred to all that the arts of painting and sculpture have produced’. This praise echoed long after the sculpture had disappeared, and its dramatic rediscovery in a vineyard in Rome in 1506 made an overwhelming impression, notably on Michelangelo, who went to see it immediately. Its liberating influence for the expression of the emotions continued to be important for Baroque sculpture and until the 19th century it was ranked (with the Apollo Belvedere and the Belvedere Torso) as one of the greatest works of antiquity. (As early as about 1530 Titian satirized the adulation it received in a woodcut showing the figures changed to monkeys.) It was given a new aesthetic significance by Winckelmann, who saw it as a supreme symbol of the moral dignity of the tragic hero and the most complete exemplification of the ‘noble simplicity and quiet majesty’ that he regarded as the essence of Greek idealistic art and the key to true beauty. In 1766 Lessing chose Laokoon as the title of the book in which he attacked Winckelmann's ideas.

The Laocoön was one of the greatest prizes taken from Italy by Napoleon and was in Paris 1798–1815. It has been restored several times since its discovery, and a complete renovation was made in the 1950s, when Laocoön's original right arm was returned to the figure and replaced in its correct position behind his head. Although no longer considered one of the world's supreme masterpieces, it has slipped in esteem much less than some once-revered antique marbles; it continues to be a work with a powerful hold over the imagination and still finds a place in almost all general histories of art.

Study of the Laocoön was revolutionized in 1957 by one of the most spectacular archaeological discoveries of the 20th century, when several groups of marble figures representing events in Homer's Odyssey were found at Sperlonga (ancient Spelunca) near Naples; the names Hagesander, Polydoros, and Athenodoros are inscribed on one of the groups (now in the museum at Sperlonga), which are close in style to the Laocoön. The cave in which these sculptures were found was evidently used as a banqueting hall by the Emperor Tiberius (reigned ad 14–37), and there is other evidence linking them with the 1st century ad, so this date is now finding favour among classical archaeologists for the Laocoön also.