The Laocoon

The most famous work of the Rhodian school of art extant is the celebrated group of the Laocoon, executed by Agesander of Rhodes, with his son Athenodorus and his pupil Polydorus, who lived after Alexander the Great. It was discovered in Rome near the Setti Sale, on the Esquiline, in 1506, while Michael Angelo was at Rome, and is now one of the chief treasures of the Vatican collection.

Laocoon, the son of Priam, was a priest of Apollo during the siege of Troy. He endeavored to persuade the Trojans that the wooden horse was not, as they thought, a palladium sent by the gods; and he tried to dissuade them from bringing it into the city, going so far as to throw a javelin at it.

On his returning to the temple to offer a sacrifice to Neptune, two enormous serpents are said to have come from under the altar, and destroyed him and his two sons.

The Trojans, attributing this to the anger of the deity, at once drew the wooden horse inside of the walls: consequently Troy was taken.

"This group represents Laocoon and his two sons in their death-agony. The two serpents have just wound themselves in unyielding and inexorable folds about the three figures. Laocoon, powerless, is pressed against the altar, at the foot of which the younger son is breathing out his life with a last sigh under the serpent's cruel bite. The father cannot help him; for he is himself struck in the side by the deadly fang of the second serpent, so that he thrusts himself upward, convulsed by a spasm of pain. . . . Overcome with the agony of death, . . . his right hand, with an expression true to nature, grasps the back of his head; and the left, with a convulsive, instinctive clutch, seeks to tear off the monster. The elder son, at his left, gazes up in horror at his father, while he vainly seeks to free his foot from the coils of the serpent, to whose rage he, too, is in a moment to fall a victim. The whole pathos is concentrated in the powerful figure of the father."

The upraised arms of the three are restorations. Pliny says,--

"The Laocoon . . . which stands in the palace of Titus, is a work which may be considered superior to all others, both in painting and statuary. The whole group, the father, the boys, and the awful folds of the serpents, were formed out of a single block."

But the lapse of two thousand years has revealed a joint so nice as to be almost imperceptible. From this, it appears that the elder of the two sons was not wrought out of the same block of marble as the father and the younger son.

Winckelmann says,--

"Among the many thousand productions of the most celebrated artists which have been brought to Rome from all parts of Greece, this statue was esteemed as the highest effort of art: it therefore certainly deserves so much the greater attention and admiration from later posterity, which is unable to produce any thing worthy of being compared with it, even remotely. The wise man finds it an inexhaustible subject of inquiry; and the artist, of instruction: and both may rest satisfied, that, though the eye discovers somewhat in this image, yet far more remains undiscovered, and that the understanding of the master was much loftier even than his work."

As to Virgil's beautiful description, we do not know which is first in point of time, the statue or the poem, they describe each other so perfectly (see AEneid, lib. ii., 201-222).