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Introduction
Laocoon and His Sons, also known the Laocoon Group, is a colossal marble statue, now in the Vatican Museums, Rome. The statue is credited by the Roman author Pliny the Elder to three sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus. It shows the Trojan priest Laocoon and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being choked by sea serpents.
Laocoon, in Greek mythology, is priest of Apollo who advised the Trojans not to touch the timber horse made by the Greeks in the times of the Trojan War. While he and his two sons were sacrificing to Poseidon at the shoreline, two serpents came from the water and squashed them. The Trojans understood this event as a sign of the gods’ condemnation of Laocoon’s prediction, and they brought the horse into the city.
Following events justified Laocoon’s judgment, however, since the horse was filled with Greeks, who waited until night and then sacked Troy. A magnificent Greek statue by Agesander, Athenodorus, and Polydorus, uncovered in Rome in 1508 and now in the Vatican, shows Laocoon and his sons in their death resist. This Hellenistic statue had a significant influence on the artists of the Renaissance.
Different dates have been proposed for the statue, ranging from about 160 to about 20 BC. Writings found at Lindos in Rhodes date Agesander and Athenedoros to a period after 42 BC, making the years 42 to 20 the most probably date for the Laocoon statue’s construction.
The statue, which was probably originally charged for the home of a wealthy Roman, was unearthed in 1506 near the site of the Golden House of the Emperor Nero (who reigned from 54 to 68 AD), and it is likely that the statue was owned to Nero himself. It was acquired by Pope Julius II, an excited classicist, soon after its detection and was located in the Belvedere Garden at the Vatican, now part of the Vatican Museums.
The ancient Laocoon applied a strong aesthetic power on the artists of the High Renaissance. The rediscovery of the sculpture – which portrays a Trojan priest punished by the gods for warning his fellow countrymen about the Greek trick of the Trojan horse – hastened the rediscovery of the traditional aesthetic. The Laocoon became a standard against which Renaissance art was regarded, thereby instituting a canon of beauty that influenced the making of art for the next 400 years.
Impact on art
The discovery of the Laocoon made a great consciousness on Italian sculptors and considerably influenced the course of Italian Renaissance art. Michelangelo is known to have been chiefly influenced by the massive scale of the work and its sensuous Hellenistic aesthetic, predominantly its image of the male figures.
The influence of the Laocoon is confirmed in many of Michelangelo’s later works, for instance the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Slave, created for the tomb of Pope Julius II. The tragic nobility of this statue is one of the themes in Gotthold Lessing’s essay on writing and aesthetics, Laokoön, one of the early classics of art disapproval.
The Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli was eager to make a copy by Pope Leo X de’ Medici. Bandinelli’s version, which was often copied and allocated in small bronzes, is at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence. A bronze casting, made for François I at Fontainebleau from a cast taken from the unique under the management of Primaticcio, is at the Musée du Louvre.
A woodcut, perhaps after a drawing by Titian, copied the sculpture by depicting three monkeys instead of humans. It has often been realized as a spoof on the awkwardness of Bandinelli’s copy, but it has also been proposed that it was a comment on debates of the time about comparisons among human and ape structure.
The Greco-Roman Laocoon was one of the most important works of art on Freud’s visual horizon, exemplified photographically in several of the books he owned. Freud paid special concentration to the Laocoon group, as the most argued work of art in the previous two centuries of German literature on aesthetics, on his first trip to Rome in 1901, the same journey in which he first stood before Moses in the silhouettes of S. Pietro in Vincoli.
In proportion to myth, the Trojan priest Laocoon warned the people of Troy to beware the Greeks’ gift of a timber horse. Athena (in her role as supporter divinity of Athens) chastised him for this act by locating giant snakes on him and his sons. The sculptural group depicts the struggle between Laocoon, flanked by his two sons, and the violent serpents biting and strangling the human figures. As a tourist site, an object symbolized in engraving and photography, and a subject of literary significance in the aesthetic treatises of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Lessing, the Laocoon played a large part in how Michelangelo’s Moses was interpreted.
The original was seized and taken to Paris by Napoleon Bonaparte after his occupation of Italy in 1799, and established in a place of honor in the Musée Napoléon at the Louvre, where it was one of the motivations of neoclassicism in French art. Following the fall of Napoleon, it was returned by the British to the Vatican in 1816.
Pliny’s account of Laocoon as “a work to be preferred to all that the arts of painting and sculpture have produced” has led to a practice which discusses this claim that the statuette is the greatest of all artworks. Johann Joachim Winkelmann wrote about the paradox of favorable beauty while seeing a scene of death and collapse. The most important donation to the debate in Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s essay Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, which examines the dissimilarities flanked by visual and storybook art by comparing the statuette with Virgil’s verse. He argues that the artists could not realistically depict the physical suffering of the victims, as this would be too painful. Instead, they had to express suffering while retaining beauty.
The most curious interference in the debate is William Blake’s annotated print Laocoon, which surrounds the image with graffiti-like observations in several speeches, written in multiple courses. Blake offers the sculpture as a middling copy of a lost Israelite original, describing it as “Jehovah & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim of Solomon’s Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or History of Ilium”. This points Blake’s theory that the simulation of ancient Greek and Roman art was destructive to the creative mind, and that standard sculpture represented a banal naturalism in contrast to Judeo-Christian religious art.
Two of the three Rhodians who worked together in the Laocoon are known from inscriptions to have held the significant civic office of Priest of Athena in their city in 22 and 21; they were then of superior age, the group may therefore be located some ten or fifteen years before. Their information of anatomy was not sufficient (the lines of the ribs are unfeasible, and one of Laocoon’s sons has a three-jointed thumb), and their serpents are absurd, but their method marks the highest point the Greeks had yet reached and it had full scope in such a subject.
Researches of age and disrepair were admirably adapted to these sculptors, and most of the extant types created at the end of the first century B.C.; the Old Peasant is clearly of the school that created the Laocoon; and the disgusting Old Fishermen (both draped and nude examples), cannot be earlier and are adequately like the Laocoon to be classed with it. A figurine of an old woman carrying a chicken to market has most of the face reinstated, but another copy gives a correct feeling of the unique head.
The well-known following century statue of a drunken old woman treatment a mauve-pot (copies in the Capitoline Museum and at Munich), is honestly comic, whereas these later statuettes are serious essays in an aesthetic problem treated in the spirit of a modern artist. Like the countrified scenes which were changed at the same time, they belong to the art of the Roman Empire rather than to the Hellenistic period.
The story is told in an epic poem called the Aeneid, written by the Roman poet Virgil in the first century BC. In many ways, the Aeneid picks up where the Greek epic, the Illiad, left off. The Greeks are at war with the Trojans as Paris, a Trojan prince, has stolen Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world.
After many years of war, the Greeks haven’t coped to contravene the walls of Troy, so they turn to trickery. The Greek army builds a giant wooden horse, leaving its belly hollow so that they can hide inside. They wheel the horse up to the walls of Troy, imaging that it’s a peace offering. But, after almost a decade of fighting with the Greeks, the Trojans are distrustful and there is a conversation about whether or not to bring the horse into the city. Amidst the confusion, Laocoon, a Trojan priest, says this:
O my poor people,
Men of Troy, what madness has come over you?
Can you believe the enemy truly gone?
A gift from the Greeks, and no ruse?
Is that their way?
Have no faith in the horse!
Whatever it is, even when Greeks bring gifts
I fear them, gifts and all.
Laocoon is chastised for his words. Some of the gods want the ruse to be triumphant so that the Greeks will win the war. So, as Laocoon stands at the seashore, preparing to make a forfeits, snakes are sent from the sea to strangle he and his sons.
From the calm sea – twin snakes
Coiling, uncoiling, swam abreast for shore,
Their underbellies showing as their crests
Reared red as blood above the swell; behind
they glided with great undulating backs.
They slid until they reached Laocoon.
Each snake enveloped one of his two boys,
twining about and feeding on the body.
Next they ensnared the man as he ran up
With weapons: coils like cables looped and bound him
Twice round the middle; twice about his throat
They whipped their back-scales, and their heads towered,
While with both hands he fought to break the knots,
Drenched in slime, his hand-bands black with venom,
Sending to heaven his appalling cries.
In 1940 Clement Greenberg wrote an essay entitled Towards a Newer Laocoon in which he argued that intangible art now presented an ideal for artists to gauge their work against, and this title was copied by a 2007 show at the Henry Moore Institute which exhibited work by modern artists influenced by the sculpture.
Almost without a doubt, the artist most pressured by the statuette was Michelangelo, whose depiction of the human figure in motion was basically altered by his study of the Laocoon. His response to the statue 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 exhibits that he was intrigued by the sculpture’s strapping tension and by the strengthening motion of the central figure as he resists to free himself from the strangling serpents. On the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Michelangelo created numerous figures with similarly muscular anatomies and located them in serpentinata locations that recall that of the central shape in the Laocoon.
And, Michelangelo observed the physical resist imagined in the sculpture to be reminiscent of the emotional confronts faced by Neoplatonic thinkers like himself, who challenges to raise their minds above the faces presented by the physical commands of their corpses. Just as Laocoon and his sons struggle alongside the snakes that will bring them to their death, so too do a number of Michelangelo’s carved figures struggle against exterior bonds, as in his famous Slaves, proposed for the tomb of Pope Julius II, but now in the Louvre in Paris and the Academia in Florence.
It is not just Michelangelo who reacted to the Laocoon. The work deeply influences the development of the western aesthetic from the time of its detection. Raphael, in a painting called Galatea, reacted to the work, as did the Venetian artist Titian and his Greek student, El Greco. Rubens drew the Laocoon and based the masterpiece of some of his paintings on the ancient statue, and even the French artist Gericault – so admiring of Michelangelo – inserts Laocoon-like passages into his famed following picture, The Raft of the Medusa.
It’s not just artists who found themselves roused by the Laocoon, however. The strong pain suffered by Laocoon and his sons, and the difference of this pain with the beauty of the statue, 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 expected 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 instants of a man who has could not succeed to save his own life and that of his own children? Another eighteenth-century intellect, G. E. Lessing, argued the work in different terms. In his influential essay, Laocoon, he used the work to differentiate between poetry and the fine arts, thereby giving birth to the division of philosophy devoted to hypothesis about the origin of art and artistic phrase, aesthetics.
The history of the Laocoon is also political. The work was so charged that nine years after its sighting, in 1515 after the Victory of Marignano, Francis I, king of France, commanded that Pope Leo X give him the Laocoon as a spoil of war. Leo X rejected the offer, and cunningly had a replica of the sculpture made, meaning to send the French king a fake if he was forced to comply with his wishes. Neither the original, nor the copy, 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 monument 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.
The earliest reference to the Laocoon is by Pliny the Elder (23-79AD), who rated the work very highly indeed in his Naturalis Historia:-
Furthermore the fame of many is not great, for in certain instances the number of artists involved stands in the way of their achieving individual renown even in the case of outstanding works, since no single person received the glory and since many names cannot all be recognized equally. Thus it is with the Laokoon in the palace of the Emperor Titus, a work that must be considered superior to all other products of the arts of painting and sculpture. From one stone the eminent artists Hagesandros, Polydoros, and Athenodoros of Rhodes, following an agreed-upon plan, made him [Laokoon], his sons, and the marvellous intertwining of the snakes. (Quoted in Pollitt, 1990, p.114)
When the subject of beginning comes to be articulated in form, the artistic impulse to reassemble and to reform is sometimes so strong as virtually to revolutionize the form. This situation gives rise to the brilliant. In the sublime, the subjects symbolized seem too large or grand for the form; in the picturesque, they seem exactly replicated in the form; in the brilliant, they seem enhanced in value by the form, or, as we might say, the form seems too large for them.
The effect in the last case is like that of placing a lens before a picture. The brilliant is characterized, therefore, by the opposite of ambiguity, i. e., by brilliance; by a radiance, too, which gives not only light, shade, and color, but sketches also that often seem greatly magnified. Of course, in the luminous, the subject-matter may be of consequence, but this is not required. The following passage gains its artistic value from secondary thoughts added to the principal subject-matter in order to improve the brilliancy of the presentation:
I saw young Harry, – with his beaver on,
His cuisses on his thighs, gallantly arm’d, –
Rise from the ground like feather’d Mercury,
And vaulted with such ease into his seat,
As if an angel dropp’d down from the clouds,
To turn and wind a fiery Pegasus,
And witch the world with noble horsemanship.
1 Henry IV., iv., 1: Shakespeare.
By categorizing the brilliant rather than the beautiful as the characteristically artistic propensity of the same impulse which, considered in relation to the good, causes the sublime, one escapes from such a criticism as is made by Chaignet in his “Les Principes de la Science du Beau” upon the inclination patented by most writers to disconnect the sublime in total from the gorgeous. He furnishes a very striking depiction of the close connection between the two by using three successive quotations.
One is from Jouffroy. In this, in order to show the dissimilarity between the effects of two works of art, the writer says that, in gazing at the Apolo, you identify that you knowledge the enjoyment of the good-looking; whereas in gazing at the Laocoon, “you experience the sensations of the transcendent.” The next quotation is from Lessing, who declares in his “Laocoon” that one experiences the awareness of beauty in that statue; and the third is from Winckelmann, who says in his “History of Ancient Art” that one information the sensation of the sublime in the face of the Apollo. When doctors disagree thus there must be a good reason for it. “Therefore,” argues Chaignet, “the sublime is not different from the beautiful, only one subdivision of it.”
After its discovery on Rome’s Esquiline Hill in 1506, the Laocoon Group was mounted in the Vatican’s Belvedere courtyard, where this exceptional figure has continued to provoke aesthetic discussion. Mainly in the literature of late 18th century German art theory, this figure commenced a communication on the relations between literature and fine art, evoking in conversation such language as “ldeal” and “Character”.
The sculpture, which depicts the Priest Laocoon and his two sons in a death fight with two giant snakes, was believed to be an original work of the performers Agesandros, Athonodros, and Polydoros of Rhodes. Though, the current postulation is that it is a Roman work from the 1st century A.D. that is most likely a copy of a Greek original. Goethe’s first serious obsession with the Laocoon group might have been Lessing’s: Laocoon, An essay on the limits of painting and poetry. He was also recognizable with Winckelmanns’ and Herders’ explanations.
But the definitive motivation for his essay, published in 1798 in his Propyläen, was the text he had persuaded the archaeologist Aloys Hirt to write. Hirt had attempted to explain from a medical standpoint why the priest Laocoon, in his agony, did not scream in pain. He wanted to apply the term “characteristic” to Greek art. Goethe argued on different levels in his essay, expounding on the position of the figures from the depicted moment, in which the serpent bites the father in his left hip, and the consequent course of motion of the group. In his essay, Goethe also developed general principles for a work of art, such as “ideal”, “grace” and “beauty”.
This displayed plaster casting still shows the imperfectly added raised right arm of Laocoon. Only in 1904 was the original arm discovered. The Group was acquired in 1869 for the opening of the Museum of the Grand Duke of Weimar. The stratified rocks as well as the selection of Etruscan bronzes reveal that Goethe did not confine his morphological observations to the natural sciences. He also considered them a practical and fertile method to apply to the arts.
In both fields, the first step in the morphological approach consists of creating sequence. Hereby the individual links in the chain should flow into one another. Goethe believed that examining sequences such as these could explain the process of becoming, as well as elucidating the laws governing the development for each link in the chain. In mineralogy, Goethe called these chronologies that illustrate the development of a mineral––in this case, of brickwork––suites.
This approach had consequences for Goethe’s own set. For example he kept his mineralogical collection in drawers, contrary to the customary 18th century appearance in display cases. In that way he could repeatedly reorder and reclassify his compilation. It seems to apply also to Goethe’s collection of smaller bronzes. His bronze collection shows that his preoccupation was increasingly oriented towards an art historical context. The antique bronzes presented in the exhibition, mainly presenting the archaic attacking god or the thoughtful Etruscan Hercules, originate from Italic, Etruscan, and Roman serial production.
They show how the formation of these series, which were used to compare patterns, could have functioned. Additionally, one should consider that in 1800 there was no chronological context for these artifacts, thus only in rare junctures could Goethe determine the definite iconography, even less so the date of these objects. His interest is obviously not so much for the art portions, but rather for the chronological chronology and the associations of form, as well as the examination of the enhancement of patterns of form.
The influence of Greek figure on medieval Europe and the Orient was not deep, as the main presents of thought and feeling among the people exaggerated by it were quite unhellenic. It remained for the Renaissance, recapturing something of the spirit of Greece, to find in classical sculpture a genuine inspiration. For the Renaissance was a rebirth of humanism; men again discovered delight in the beauty of the human body and the free activity of the human mind. Sculptors who were able to portray the variety and charm of life became renowned, and their ateliers were thronged with trainees and were respected by statesmen as in the days of Greece. A fresh creative spirit inspirited the art as it did the entire life of the period.
The sculptors of the Quattrocento in Italy, in determining how to represent the human form, eagerly went to school to their traditional antecedents. Scattered about Italy there were sarcophagi, infrequent heads and statutes, and the remains of Roman architecture with their sculptural decoration. By the last quarter of the 15th century the popes had begun to form collections in Rome, which included such statues as the Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoon, the Ariadne, the Nile and the Tiber and the Belvedere Torso.
Cosimo dei Medici in Florence made a similar collection of classical objects of art, especially medals, cameos and reliefs. This material provided instruction for every school of sculpture. In Vasari’s biographies we read how Nicola Pisano, the predecessor of the Renaissance, studied the sarcophagi in Pisa, and “was attracted by the excellence of this work in which he delighted and which he studied diligently, imitating the estimable method of these works with so much achievement that no long time elapsed before he was esteemed the best sculptor of his time”; how Andrea Pisano found fortune constructive, “many relics of antiquity having been collected in Pisa by the fleets of that city as results of their frequent victories”; how Ghiberti “took delight in imitating the dies of ancient coins and medals”; how Brunelleschi and Donatello “labored continually and sparing neither time or cost measured Roman buildings”, and Donatello “labored to the utmost of his power to imitate the works of the ancients”; how Verrocchio, after seeing the eagerness for these collections, chosen to devote himself to sculpture.
Conclusion
The much-admired figure group, Laocoon, he pointed out, may have had “more expression in the countenance” than any other antique statue – understandably, given the repulsiveness of being choked by giant snakes– but the “passion” that Laocoon alludes to “is still more strongly stated by the suffering and frown of the body than by the features.” Keep that in mind in the existence of the show’s “how to depict suffering” assortments.
When we examine the statue of the late Gothic and early resurgence period it is possible to mention how true Vasari’s arguments are. The heads, approachess and draperies on Nicola Pisano’s pulpit for the Baptistery in Pisa are obviously derived from those of the sarcophagus in the Campo Santo, and certain figures, such as the Samson, are actual copies. Donatello, official consultant and restorer of traditional works of art for Cosimo, beautified his busts with antique cameos, liberally scrounged Roman putti, garland and architectural motifs for his reliefs, and generated sculptures with the structural reliability and organically-related materials of his traditional models.
References
Agard, Walter Raymond. The Greek Tradition in Sculpture. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1930.
Lawrence, A. W. Later Greek Sculpture: And Its Influence on East and West. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927.
Lullies, Reinhard. Greek Sculpture. Trans. Michael Bullock. Revised ed. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1957.
Mather, Frank Jewett. A History of Italian Painting. New York: Henry Holt, 1923.
Plante, Michael. “Sculpture’s Autre: Falkenstein’s Direct Metal Sculpture and the Art Autre Aesthetic.” Art Journal 53.4 (1994): 66.
Pollitt, J. J.. The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1990.
Raymond , George Lansing. The Essentials of Aesthetics in Music, Poetry, Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. 3rd ed. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1921.
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