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Laocoön and his Sons
Museum Label:
Chiurazzi description:
Laocoön. One of the most discussed and famous group of the Hellenistic art, defined by
Michelangelo as a prodigy of art. Is the original work of the Rhodian artist Agessandro,
II century b.C. Laocoön a Troyan priest of Apollo, who dared to dissuade against drawing
the wooden horse into the city of Troy was, together with his two sons, condemned by the
anger of the gods to be crushed to death by serpents. Incomparable is the expression of
anguish and spasm of suffering in the face of Laocoön.
Origin: Museo Vaticano |
Origin:
Roman copy of a Hellenistic original from c. 200 BCE, marble, height 1.84 m, Vatican.
Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons are attacked at an altar by giant snakes. Pliny
said it was the work of three sculptors from Rhodes, Hagesandros, Polydoros, and
Athenodoros. The date of the Laocoon is controversial, some scholars arguing for the late
second century BCE, others for c. 50 BCE.
Laocoön:
Laocoön (pronounced roughly La oh koh on), son of Priam, was
allegedly a priest of Poseidon (or of Apollo, by some accounts) at Troy; he was famous for
warning the Trojans in vain against accepting the Trojan Horse from the Greeks, and for
his subsequent divine execution. Virgil's Aeneid describes the circumstances of Laocoön's
death as follows:
Laocoön warned his fellow Trojans against the wooden horse presented to the city by the
Greeks. In the Aeneid, Virgil gives Laocoön the famous line "Do not trust the
Horse, Trojans. Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts." This line is
the source of the saying: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."
The Trojans disregarded his advice, however, and in his resulting anger Laocoön threw his
spear at the Horse. Poseidon (some say Athena), who was supporting the Greeks,
subsequently sent sea-serpents to strangle Laocoön and his two sons,
Subject info:
On January 14, 1506, a momentous discovery was made in the city of Rome. While digging in
his vineyard on the Esquiline Hill, near the church of Santa Maria Maggiore, a farmer
began to uncover pieces of marble statuary. A large trench was cut around the statuary
fragments to allow closer examination of the nine pieces, which appeared to belong to a
sculptural composition that included a life-size figure. Word of the discovery quickly
reached Pope Julius II, who promptly dispatched the architect Giuliano da Sangallo, and
the artist, Michelangelo, to inspect the new discovery.
Though ancient sculptures were regularly pulled from the ground in Renaissance Rome, this
find proved to be of extraordinary interest. Almost immediately, the fragments were
identified as belonging to the Laocoon, a sculpture that had stood in the palace of the
ancient Emperor Titus and that was known to Renaissance humanists because it received the
highest of praise from the first-century writer, Pliny the Younger, in his volume, The
Natural History.
Finding the Laocoon was a dream come true for well-educated Renaissance artists and
patrons who were intent on restoring Rome to its ancient glory. At the very moment in
which the idea of "Rome Reborn" was being made manifest in citywide art and
architecture projects, the Laocoon emerged from the earth, further fuelling the
Renaissance dream of returning Rome to its ancient glory. The only pieces missing
were Laocoön's right arm and both his son's right hands.
By March of 1506, Pope Julius II managed to procure the sculpture for his own antiquities
collection, and in July of the same year he triumphantly transported the sculpture through
the streets of the Rome, which were lined with throngs of citizens who showered the
sculpture with flower petals. Julius even ordered the Sistine Chapel Choir to serenade the
sculpture as the procession made its way to the Belvedere Courtyard of the Vatican Palace.
Without a doubt, the Laocoon was the prize of the century.
Once the sculpture arrived in the Belvedere Courtyard, it set off a flurry of attempts to
restore it (both Laocoon and his youngest son were missing their right arms), as well as
efforts to emulate its admirable aesthetic qualities. Every artist working in early
sixteenth-century Rome was certainly aware of the sculpture. Asked to create new arms for
Laocoon and his son, Michelangelo declined, claiming his talents to be less than those of
the Greek sculptors who created the work some 1500 years earlier. The architect, Donato
Bramante, hosted a contest amongst artists to make a wax copy of the sculpture, and that
contest - won by the Venetian architect Jacopo Sansovino - was judged by the painter
Raphael.
The ancient Laocoon exerted a potent aesthetic power on the artists of the High
Renaissance. The rediscovery of the sculpture - which depicts a Trojan priest punished by
the gods for warning his fellow countrymen about the Greek ruse of the Trojan horse -
accelerated the rediscovery of the classical aesthetic. The Laocoon became a standard
against which Renaissance art was judged, thereby establishing a canon of beauty that
influenced the making of art for the next 400 years.
Almost without a doubt, the artist most influenced by the sculpture was Michelangelo,
whose representation of the human figure in motion was fundamentally changed by his study
of the Laocoon. His response to the sculpture was not that of simply copying its form or
composition, however. Rather, he incorporated the qualities of the sculpture that he found
most compelling into his own artistic style.
Michelangelo's oeuvre clearly demonstrates that he was intrigued by the sculpture's
muscular tension and by the spiraling motion of the central figure as he struggles to free
himself from the strangling snakes. On the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Michelangelo created
numerous figures with similarly muscular anatomies and placed them in serpentinata
positions that recall that of the central figure in the Laocoon.
And, Michelangelo found the physical struggle portrayed in the sculpture to be evocative
of the psychological challenges faced by Neoplatonic thinkers like himself, who struggled
to raise their minds above the challenges presented by the physical demands of their
bodies. Just as Laocoon and his sons struggle against the snakes that will bring them to
their death, so too do a number of Michelangelo's sculpted figures struggle against
external bonds, as in his famous Slaves, intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II, but now
in the Louvre in Paris and the Accademia in Florence.
It is not just Michelangelo who responded to the Laocoon. The work profoundly affected the
development of the western
aesthetic from the time of its discovery. Raphael, in a painting called Galatea, responded
to the work, as did the Venetian artist Titian and his Greek student, El Greco. Rubens
drew the Laocoon and based the composition of some of his paintings on the ancient
sculpture, and even the French artist Gericault - so admiring of Michelangelo - inserts
Laocoon-like passages into his famous political painting, The Raft of the Medusa.
It's not just artists who found themselves stimulated by the Laocoon, however. The intense
pain suffered by Laocoon and his sons, and the contrast of this pain with the beauty of
the sculpture, was a topic of discussion for the eighteenth-century father of art history,
J. J. Winckelmann. How, Winckelmann asked, can a viewer cope with the inevitable mental
conflict that arises when one admires the beauty of the Laocoon, but is at the same time
painfully aware that the sculpture portrays the final, painful moments of a man who has
failed to save his own life and that of his own children? Another eighteenth-century
intellect, G. E. Lessing, discussed the work in different terms. In his influential essay,
Laocoon, he used the work to distinguish between poetry and the fine arts, thereby giving
birth to the branch of philosophy devoted to theories about the nature of art and artistic
expression, aesthetics.
The history of the Laocoon is also political. The work was so valued that nine years after
its discovery, in 1515 after the Victory of Marignano, Francis I, king of France, demanded
that Pope Leo X give him the Laocoon as a spoil of war. Leo X refused, and cleverly had a
replica of the sculpture made, intending to send the French king a fake if he was forced
to comply with his wishes. Neither the original, nor the replica, went to France in the
sixteenth century, but the Laocoon did have a Parisian idyll that began in 1797. By the
time of Napoleon, the sculpture was so established in the artistic canon, that it was
carted off and taken to Paris, along with other famous works like the Apollo Belvedere.
These Italian spoils stood in places of honor in Napoleon's Louvre, until they were
restored to Rome after his defeat.
https://www.idcrome.org/laocoon.htm
More information on other sculpture.
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