Laocoön and His Sons
The priest Laocoön and his sons are crushed by sea serpents. The group was unearthed in Rome in 1506 and became famous at once – Michelangelo was there when it was found.
The face and the straining muscles show pain; Hellenistic art sought to stir emotions, not merely to present ideals.
The sculptural group was unearthed in January 1506 in a vineyard on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. Pope Julius II sent the architect Giuliano da Sangallo to see the find, and Michelangelo went with him. Sangallo immediately recognised the work from a description by the Roman writer Pliny the Elder. Pliny wrote that the group stood in the palace of the emperor Titus and was made by three sculptors from Rhodes: Hagesandros, Polydoros and Athanodoros. The owner of the vineyard was Felice de Fredis. The group had lain buried in ruins for almost a thousand years.
The subject comes from the story of the fall of Troy. The priest Laocoön warned the Trojans about the wooden horse the Greeks had left behind. As punishment the gods sent two sea serpents that attacked him and his two sons. The best-known version is in Virgil’s epic, the Aeneid.
The group is composed as a pyramid with Laocoön in the centre. His body twists as he struggles against the serpent, his muscles taut and his head thrown back. His eyebrows are raised and his mouth half open. The sons on either side are smaller than their father. One seems already to be giving up, while the other looks towards his father and may perhaps break free. The coils of the serpents bind the three bodies together and turn the group into a single movement.
When and how the group was made is debated. Some scholars see it as a Roman copy of a Greek bronze original from around 200 BC. Others argue that it is an original from the first century BC or AD. Pliny wrote that it was carved from a single block, but it actually consists of several pieces. The question of dating affects how the group should be understood: as a Hellenistic masterpiece or as a Roman commission in the Greek style.
Julius II bought the group and set it up in the Belvedere Courtyard in the Vatican. Laocoön’s right arm was missing and was replaced with an outstretched arm. In 1906 the archaeologist Ludwig Pollak found a bent marble arm in a stonemason’s workshop in Rome. In the 1950s it was established that it belonged to the statue, and it was put back. In Napoleon’s time the group was taken to Paris, but it was returned to Rome after 1815.
The group became hugely important for Renaissance and Baroque sculptors, not least Michelangelo. In the 18th century Johann Joachim Winckelmann described Greek art as having “noble simplicity and quiet grandeur”, with the Laocoön as his example. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing took the group as his starting point in his 1766 essay Laocoön on the difference between visual art and poetry.
Today the Laocoön stands in the Vatican Museums. It is one of the best-known examples of how a single archaeological find can shape the development of art for several hundred years. It has often been copied, including in bronze for King Francis I of France.