The story behind the scene
Laocoön was a priest at Troy. When the Greeks left the wooden horse outside the walls, he warned the Trojans not to trust it and threw his spear into its side. Then, in Virgil’s telling in the Aeneid, two serpents came out of the sea, seized his two young sons first, and when the father ran to help them, wound twice around his waist and twice around his throat. He struggled with both hands at the knots and roared like a wounded bull at the altar. The Trojans read his death as a punishment for striking the horse, and brought it into the city.
Ancient versions differ in the details. Virgil makes Laocoön a priest of Neptune; the Vatican calls him a priest of Apollo and has the serpents sent by Athena and Poseidon, who favoured the Greeks. For Romans the story mattered especially, because the fall of Troy led Aeneas to flee and, in the end, to the founding of Rome.
Why it is so intense
Classical statues usually show a calm moment, or the instant before an action. The Laocoön shows the action at its worst. The father is in the centre between his sons, his body arched and twisting, his face turned up in pain; the boys on either side are caught in the same coils, so that the three figures cannot be read apart. No figure is at rest, and the serpents tie the whole group into one struggle. It is the most extreme example of what Hellenistic sculpture was willing to show: suffering, made visible and carved with complete control.
Pliny’s masterpiece
Pliny the Elder saw the group in the palace of the emperor Titus and called it a work to be preferred to any other production of painting or sculpture. He says it was carved from a single block, father, children and serpents, by three artists of Rhodes working together: Agesander, Polydoros and Athenodoros. He adds that when several Hellenistic artists share a work, the glory is divided and none of them becomes famous on his own.
Found in 1506
The group came out of the ground on the Esquiline Hill in Rome in 1506 and was immediately identified as the Laocoön described by Pliny. Pope Julius II bought it and displayed it in the courtyard of statues in the Vatican. Its date has been much debated; the Vatican places it around 40-30 BCE, at the very end of the Hellenistic period.
Where to see it
The Laocoön is in the Vatican Museums, in the Octagonal Court of the Museo Pio-Clementino. Check opening times before you go.
Sources
- Vatican Museums, “Laocoön”.
- Pliny the Elder, Natural History 36.37, trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley (Perseus Digital Library).
- Virgil, Aeneid 2.40-56 and 2.199-233, trans. J. Dryden (Perseus Digital Library).
