The Laocoãƒâ¶n Group Is an Example of What Style of Greek Art?

Ancient sculpture excavated in Rome in 1506 and displayed in the Vatican

Laocoön and His Sons
Medium	Marble
Dimensions	208 cm × 163 cm × 112 cm (six ft 10 in × 5 ft 4 in × 3 ft eight in)[one]
Location	Vatican Museums, Vatican City
Coordinates	41°54′15″Northward 12°27′17″E  /  41.90417°North 12.45472°E  / 41.90417; 12.45472

3-D model (click to rotate)

The statue of Laocoön and His Sons , also called the Laocoön Group (Italian: Gruppo del Laocoonte), has been ane of the most famous ancient sculptures ever since it was excavated in Rome in 1506 and placed on public display in the Vatican Museums,^[2] where information technology remains. It is very likely the same statue that was praised in the highest terms by the main Roman writer on fine art, Pliny the Elder.^[3] The figures are almost life-size and the grouping is a little over 2 k (6 ft seven in) in height, showing the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus being attacked by sea serpents.^[1]

The group has been called "the prototypical icon of homo agony" in Western fine art,^[iv] and unlike the desperation oftentimes depicted in Christian art showing the Passion of Jesus and martyrs, this suffering has no redemptive power or reward.^[5] The suffering is shown through the contorted expressions of the faces (Charles Darwin pointed out that Laocoön'southward jutting eyebrows are physiologically incommunicable),^[6] which are matched by the struggling bodies, peculiarly that of Laocoön himself, with every function of his body straining.^[vii]

Pliny attributes the work, then in the palace of Emperor Titus, to three Greek sculptors from the island of Rhodes: Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus, but does not give a date or patron. In style it is considered "one of the finest examples of the Hellenistic baroque" and certainly in the Greek tradition,^[8] but information technology is non known whether it is an original work or a re-create of an earlier sculpture, probably in bronze, or made for a Greek or Roman commission. The view that it is an original work of the 2nd century BC at present has few if any supporters, although many still see it as a copy of such a piece of work made in the early Imperial flow, probably of a bronze original.^[9] Others run into it as probably an original work of the later period, continuing to use the Pergamene fashion of some ii centuries earlier. In either instance, it was probably deputed for the dwelling house of a wealthy Roman, possibly of the Imperial family. Various dates have been suggested for the statue, ranging from about 200 BC to the 70s Advertisement,^[10] though "a Julio-Claudian appointment [betwixt 27 BC and 68 AD] ... is now preferred".^[11]

Although mostly in excellent status for an excavated sculpture, the group is missing several parts, and analysis suggests that it was remodelled in aboriginal times and has undergone a number of restorations since it was excavated.^[12] It is on brandish in the Museo Pio-Clementino, a part of the Vatican Museums.

Field of study [edit]

The group equally it was between c. 1540 and 1957, with Laocoön's extended arm; the sons' restored arms were removed in the 1980s.

The story of Laocoön, a Trojan priest, came from the Greek Epic Cycle on the Trojan Wars, though it is not mentioned by Homer. It had been the subject of a tragedy, at present lost, by Sophocles and was mentioned past other Greek writers, though the events around the attack by the serpents vary considerably. The about famous account of these is now in Virgil's Aeneid (encounter the Aeneid quotation at the entry Laocoön), but this dates from betwixt 29 and 19 BC, which is possibly later than the sculpture. Withal, some scholars come across the group as a delineation of the scene as described past Virgil.^[13]

In Virgil, Laocoön was a priest of Poseidon who was killed with both his sons subsequently attempting to betrayal the ruse of the Trojan Equus caballus by striking it with a spear. In Sophocles, on the other hand, he was a priest of Apollo, who should have been celibate but had married. The serpents killed only the two sons, leaving Laocoön himself alive to suffer.^[fourteen] In other versions he was killed for having had sex with his wife in the temple of Poseidon, or simply making a sacrifice in the temple with his wife present.^[15] In this second grouping of versions, the snakes were sent by Poseidon^[xvi] and in the first by Poseidon and Athena, or Apollo, and the deaths were interpreted past the Trojans equally proof that the horse was a sacred object. The two versions have rather different morals: Laocoön was either punished for doing wrong, or for being right.^[8]

The snakes are depicted every bit both biting and constricting, and are probably intended every bit venomous, as in Virgil.^[17] Pietro Aretino idea and then, praising the group in 1537:

...the ii serpents, in attacking the three figures, produce the nearly striking semblances of fear, suffering and death. The youth embraced in the coils is fearful; the old man struck by the fangs is in torment; the child who has received the toxicant, dies.^[eighteen]

In at least one Greek telling of the story the older son is able to escape, and the composition seems to allow for that possibility.^[xix]

History [edit]

Ancient times [edit]

The style of the piece of work is agreed to be that of the Hellenistic "Pergamene baroque" which arose in Greek Asia Minor around 200 BC, and whose best known undoubtedly original piece of work is the Pergamon Chantry, dated c. 180–160 BC, and at present in Berlin.^[20] Here the figure of Alcyoneus is shown in a pose and situation (including serpents) which is very similar to those of Laocoön, though the style is "looser and wilder in its principles" than the chantry.^[21]

The execution of the Laocoön is extremely fine throughout, and the composition very carefully calculated, fifty-fifty though it appears that the group underwent adjustments in ancient times. The two sons are rather minor in scale compared to their father,^[21] merely this adds to the bear upon of the central figure. The fine white marble used is often thought to be Greek, but has not been identified by analysis.

Pliny [edit]

In Pliny's survey of Greek and Roman stone sculpture in his encyclopedic Natural History (XXXVI, 37), he says:

....in the instance of several works of very swell excellence, the number of artists that have been engaged upon them has proved a considerable obstacle to the fame of each, no individual being able to engross the whole of the credit, and it being impossible to accolade it in due proportion to the names of the several artists combined. Such is the example with the Laocoön, for case, in the palace of the Emperor Titus, a work that may be looked upon equally preferable to any other product of the art of painting or of [bronze] statuary. It is sculptured from a unmarried block, both the main figure as well as the children, and the serpents with their marvellous folds. This group was made in concert by three about eminent artists, Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, natives of Rhodes.^[22]

Information technology is generally accepted that this is the same work equally is now in the Vatican.^[23] It is now very oft thought that the three Rhodians were copyists, possibly of a bronze sculpture from Pergamon, created around 200 BC.^{[24] [25]} Information technology is noteworthy that Pliny does not address this issue explicitly, in a mode that suggests "he regards it every bit an original".^[26] Pliny states that it was located in the palace of the emperor Titus, and it is possible that it remained in the same identify until 1506 (see "Findspot" section below). He besides asserts that it was carved from a single piece of marble, though the Vatican work comprises at least seven interlocking pieces.^{[27] [28]} The phrase translated higher up as "in concert" (de consilii sententia) is regarded past some equally referring to their commission rather than the artists' method of working, giving in Nigel Spivey'south translation: " [the artists] at the behest of council designed a group...", which Spivey takes to hateful that the committee was past Titus, possibly fifty-fifty advised past Pliny among other savants.^[29]

The same iii artists' names, though in a different lodge (Athenodoros, Agesander, and Polydorus), with the names of their fathers, are inscribed on one of the sculptures at Tiberius'southward villa at Sperlonga (though they may predate his ownership),^[30] but it seems likely that not all the 3 masters were the same individuals.^[31] Though broadly like in style, many aspects of the execution of the 2 groups are drastically different, with the Laocoon group of much higher quality and end.^[32]

Some scholars used to think that honorific inscriptions found at Lindos in Rhodes dated Agesander and Athenodoros, recorded as priests, to a period afterwards 42 BC, making the years 42 to 20 BC the nigh likely date for the Laocoön group's creation.^[24] Nonetheless the Sperlonga inscription, which besides gives the fathers of the artists, makes it clear that at least Agesander is a dissimilar individual from the priest of the same proper name recorded at Lindos, though very perhaps related. The names may have recurred across generations, a Rhodian habit, within the context of a family workshop (which might well have included the adoption of promising young sculptors).^[33] Altogether 8 "signatures" (or labels) of an Athenodoros are found on sculptures or bases for them, 5 of these from Italy. Some, including that from Sperlonga, tape his male parent as Agesander.^[34] The whole question remains the discipline of bookish debate.

Renaissance [edit]

Head of the older son, Antiphantes

The group was unearthed in February 1506 in the vineyard of Felice De Fredis; informed of the fact, Pope Julius 2, an enthusiastic classicist, sent for his court artists. Michelangelo was called to the site of the unearthing of the statue immediately subsequently its discovery,^[35] along with the Florentine builder Giuliano da Sangallo and his eleven-twelvemonth-old son Francesco da Sangallo, later a sculptor, who wrote an business relationship over sixty years later:^[36]

The first time I was in Rome when I was very young, the pope was told about the discovery of some very beautiful statues in a vineyard nigh Santa Maria Maggiore. The pope ordered 1 of his officers to run and tell Giuliano da Sangallo to go and see them. And so he set off immediately. Since Michelangelo Buonarroti was always to be establish at our business firm, my father having summoned him and having assigned him the commission of the pope's tomb, my father wanted him to come forth, also. I joined up with my father and off we went. I climbed downward to where the statues were when immediately my begetter said, "That is the Laocoön, which Pliny mentions". And then they dug the hole wider and so that they could pull the statue out. As before long equally it was visible anybody started to depict (or "started to have lunch"),^[37] all the while discoursing on ancient things, chatting besides about the ones in Florence.

Julius caused the grouping on March 23, giving De Fredis a job as a scribe equally well as the community revenues from 1 of the gates of Rome. By August the group was placed for public viewing in a niche in the wall of the make new Belvedere Garden at the Vatican, now function of the Vatican Museums, which regard this equally the start of their history. As yet it had no base, which was not added until 1511, and from various prints and drawings from the time the older son appears to have been completely detached from the rest of the group.^[38]

In July 1798 the statue was taken to France in the wake of the French conquest of Italy, though the replacement parts were left in Rome. It was on display when the new Musée Central des Arts, subsequently the Musée Napoléon, opened at the Louvre in Nov 1800. A competition was announced for new parts to consummate the composition, only there were no entries. Some plaster sections past François Girardon, over 150 years old, were used instead. After Napoleon's final defeat at the Boxing of Waterloo in 1815 most (but certainly not all) the artworks plundered past the French were returned, and the Laocoön reached Rome in January 1816.^[39]

Restorations [edit]

The arm later on refixing, 2010

When the statue was discovered, Laocoön's right arm was missing, along with part of the manus of i kid and the correct arm of the other, and various sections of snake. The older son, on the right, was detached from the other two figures.^[40] The age of the altar used as a seat by Laocoön remains uncertain.^[41] Artists and connoisseurs debated how the missing parts should exist interpreted. Michelangelo suggested that the missing correct artillery were originally bent dorsum over the shoulder. Others, however, believed information technology was more appropriate to testify the correct artillery extended outwards in a heroic gesture.^[42]

According to Vasari, in about 1510 Bramante, the Pope'due south architect, held an breezy contest amidst sculptors to make replacement correct arms, which was judged by Raphael, and won past Jacopo Sansovino.^[43] The winner, in the outstretched position, was used in copies but not fastened to the original group, which remained as it was until 1532, when Giovanni Antonio Montorsoli, a pupil of Michelangelo, added his fifty-fifty more straight version of Laocoön's outstretched arm, which remained in place until modernistic times. In 1725–1727 Agostino Cornacchini added a section to the younger son'southward arm, and later on 1816 Antonio Canova tidied up the grouping subsequently their return from Paris, without beingness convinced by the correctness of the additions just wishing to avert a controversy.^[44]

A maiolica rendering, Urbino, c. 1530–1545; note the absent-minded plinth seat

In 1906 Ludwig Pollak, archeologist, art dealer and director of the Museo Barracco, discovered a fragment of a marble arm in a builder's yard in Rome, close to where the group was establish. Noting a stylistic similarity to the Laocoön grouping he presented it to the Vatican Museums: it remained in their storerooms for half a century. In 1957 the museum decided that this arm – aptitude, equally Michelangelo had suggested – had originally belonged to this Laocoön, and replaced it. According to Paolo Liverani: "Remarkably, despite the lack of a critical department, the bring together between the body and the arm was guaranteed past a drill hole on 1 piece which aligned perfectly with a respective pigsty on the other."^[45]

In the 1980s the statue was dismantled and reassembled, over again with the Pollak arm incorporated.^[46] The restored portions of the children's arms and easily were removed. In the course of disassembly,^[47] it was possible to observe breaks, cuttings, metal tenons, and dowel holes which suggested that in artifact, a more compact, 3-dimensional pyramidal grouping of the three figures had been used or at least contemplated. According to Seymour Howard, both the Vatican grouping and the Sperlonga sculptures "prove a similar taste for open and flexible pictorial organization that chosen for pyrotechnic piercing and lent itself to changes at the site, and in new situations".^[eleven]

The more open, planographic composition along a plane, used in the restoration of the Laocoön group, has been interpreted as "plain the result of serial reworkings by Roman Imperial also every bit Renaissance and modern craftsmen". A unlike reconstruction was proposed past Seymour Howard, to give "a more cohesive, baroque-looking and diagonally-prepare pyramidal limerick", past turning the older son every bit much every bit 90°, with his dorsum to the side of the chantry, and looking towards the frontal viewer rather than at his male parent.^[48] The findings Seymour Howard documented do not alter his belief nigh the organization of the original. But dating the reworked scroll ends by measuring the depth of the surface crust and comparing the metallic dowels in the original and reworked portions allows i to determine the provenance of the parts and the sequence of the repairs.^[48] Other suggestions accept been made.^[49]

Influence [edit]

Titian's parody of the Laocoön equally a grouping of apes

The discovery of the Laocoön made a groovy impression on Italian artists and connected to influence Italian art into the Bizarre flow. Michelangelo is known to have been particularly impressed past the massive scale of the piece of work and its sensuous Hellenistic aesthetic, particularly its delineation of the male figures. The influence of the Laocoön, as well as the Belvedere Trunk, is evidenced in many of Michelangelo'south subsequently sculptures, such as the Rebellious Slave and the Dying Slave, created for the tomb of Pope Julius 2. Several of the ignudi and the figure of Haman in the Sistine Chapel ceiling draw on the figures.^[l] Raphael used the face of Laocoön for his Homer in his Parnassus in the Raphael Rooms, expressing blindness rather than pain.^[51]

The Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli was commissioned to make a re-create by the Medici Pope Leo X. Bandinelli's version, which was oftentimes copied and distributed in small bronzes, is in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, the Pope having decided it was also good to ship to François I of France equally originally intended.^[52] A bronze casting, made for François I at Fontainebleau from a mold taken from the original under the supervision of Primaticcio, is at the Musée du Louvre. In that location are many copies of the statue, including a well-known one in the G Palace of the Knights of St. John in Rhodes. Many nevertheless show the arm in the outstretched position, but the copy in Rhodes has been corrected.

The group was quickly depicted in prints equally well every bit small models, and became known all over Europe. Titian appears to have had access to a good cast or reproduction from virtually 1520, and echoes of the figures begin to announced in his works, two of them in the Averoldi Altarpiece of 1520–1522.^[53] A woodcut, probably after a drawing by Titian, parodied the sculpture by portraying three apes instead of humans. Information technology has often been interpreted as a satire on the clumsiness of Bandinelli's copy, or as a commentary on debates of the fourth dimension around the similarities between human and ape anatomy.^[54] It has also been suggested that this woodcut was one of a number of Renaissance images that were fabricated to reverberate gimmicky doubts as to the authenticity of the Laocoön Group, the 'aping' of the statue referring to the wrong pose of the Trojan priest who was depicted in aboriginal art in the traditional sacrificial pose, with his leg raised to subdue the bull.^[55] Over fifteen drawings of the group made by Rubens in Rome accept survived, and the influence of the figures can exist seen in many of his major works, including his Descent from the Cross in Antwerp Cathedral.^[56]

The original was seized and taken to Paris by Napoleon Bonaparte subsequently his conquest of Italy in 1799, and installed in a place of honour in the Musée Napoléon at the Louvre. Post-obit the fall of Napoleon, it was returned past the Allies to the Vatican in 1816.

Laocoön as an ideal of art [edit]

Blake's Laocoön print, c. 1820.

Pliny's description of Laocoön equally "a piece of work to be preferred to all that the arts of painting and sculpture have produced"^[57] has led to a tradition which debates this merits that the sculpture is the greatest of all artworks. Johann Joachim Winkelmann (1717–1768) wrote about the paradox of admiring beauty while seeing a scene of death and failure.^[58] The near influential contribution to the debate, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's essay Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, examines the differences betwixt visual and literary art by comparison the sculpture with Virgil's poesy. He argues that the artists could not realistically depict the physical suffering of the victims, every bit this would be also painful. Instead, they had to express suffering while retaining beauty.^[59]

Johann Goethe said the following in his essay, Upon the Laocoon "A true work of art, similar a work of nature, never ceases to open boundlessly before the listen. We examine, – we are impressed with it, – it produces its effect; but information technology tin never be all comprehended, still less can its essence, its value, exist expressed in words.^[60]

The almost unusual intervention in the debate, William Blake'southward annotated impress Laocoön, surrounds the image with graffiti-like commentary in several languages, written in multiple directions. Blake presents the sculpture as a mediocre re-create of a lost Israelite original, describing it every bit "Jehovah & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim Of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or History of Ilium".^[61] This reflects Blake's theory that the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman art was destructive to the artistic imagination, and that Classical sculpture represented a banal naturalism in contrast to Judeo-Christian spiritual art.

The key figure of Laocoön served as loose inspiration for the Indian in Horatio Greenough's The Rescue (1837–1850) which stood before the east facade of the United states Capitol for over 100 years.^[62]

Near the end of Charles Dickens' 1843 novella, A Christmas Ballad, Ebenezer Scrooge self-describes "making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings" in his hurry to clothes on Christmas morning.

John Ruskin disliked the sculpture and compared its "disgusting convulsions" unfavourably with work by Michelangelo, whose fresco of The Brazen Serpent, on a corner pendentive of the Sistine Chapel, also involves figures struggling with snakes – the fiery serpents of the Volume of Numbers.^[63] He invited contrast between the "meagre lines and contemptible tortures of the Laocoon" and the "awfulness and quietness" of Michelangelo, saying "the slaughter of the Dardan priest" was "entirely wanting" in sublimity.^[63] Furthermore, he attacked the limerick on naturalistic grounds, contrasting the advisedly studied human anatomy of the restored figures with the unconvincing portrayal of the snakes:^[63]

For whatever knowledge of the human frame there may be in the Laocoön, at that place is certainly none of the habits of serpents. The fixing of the serpent's caput in the side of the principal effigy is every bit false to nature, as information technology is poor in composition of line. A large snake never wants to bite, it wants to hold, it seizes therefore always where it tin hold all-time, by the extremities, or throat, information technology seizes once and forever, and that before information technology coils, following up the seizure with the twist of its body round the victim, as invisibly swift as the twist of a whip lash round whatever difficult object it may strike, and so it holds fast, never moving the jaws or the body, if its casualty has any power of struggling left, information technology throws round some other curlicue, without quitting the concord with the jaws; if Laocoön had had to do with real serpents, instead of pieces of tape with heads to them, he would have been held still, and not allowed to throw his arms or legs near.

In 1910 the critic Irving Babbit used the title The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Defoliation of the Arts for an essay on contemporary culture at the first of the 20th century. In 1940 Clement Greenberg adapted the concept for his own essay entitled Towards a Newer Laocoön in which he argued that abstract art at present provided an ideal for artists to measure their work against. A 2007 exhibition^[64] at the Henry Moore Plant in plough copied this championship while exhibiting work past modernistic artists influenced by the sculpture.

Findspot [edit]

This map shows the findspot of the sculpture – almost the R in "SERVIUS", due east of the Sette Sale

The location where the buried statue was found in 1506 was always known to be "in the vineyard of Felice De Fredis" on the Oppian Hill (the southern spur of the Esquiline Hill), as noted in the document recording the sale of the group to the Pope. Merely over time, cognition of the site'due south precise location was lost, across "vague" statements such as Sangallo'south "about Santa Maria Maggiore" (see in a higher place) or it being "near the site of the Domus Aurea" (the palace of the Emperor Nero); in mod terms near the Colosseum.^[65] An inscribed plaque of 1529 in the church building of Santa Maria in Aracoeli records the burial of De Fredis and his son there, covering his finding of the group but giving no occupation. Research published in 2010 has recovered two documents in the municipal archives (badly indexed, and so missed by before researchers), which have established a much more precise location for the find: slightly to the due east of the southern end of the Sette Sale, the ruined cistern for the successive imperial baths at the base of the hill by the Colosseum.^[66]

The first certificate records De Fredis' purchase of a vineyard of about 1.5 hectares from a convent for 135 ducats on 14 November 1504, exactly xiv months before the finding of the statue. The second document, from 1527, makes it clear that there is now a business firm on the property, and clarifies the location; by so De Fredis was expressionless and his widow rented out the house. The business firm appears on a map of 1748,^[67] and still survives as a substantial edifice of three storeys, equally of 2014^[update] in the courtyard of a convent. The surface area remained mainly agronomical until the 19th century, but is now entirely built upwardly. It is speculated that De Fredis began edifice the house soon after his purchase, and as the grouping was reported to have been found some iv metres below footing, at a depth unlikely to be reached by normal vineyard-digging operations, it seems probable that it was discovered when digging the foundations for the firm, or peradventure a well for information technology.^[66]

The findspot was within and very close to the Servian Wall, which was still maintained in the 1st century Advertising (possibly converted to an aqueduct), though no longer the metropolis boundary, as edifice had spread well beyond it. The spot was inside the Gardens of Maecenas, founded by Gaius Maecenas the marry of Augustus and patron of the arts. He bequeathed the gardens to Augustus in 8 BC, and Tiberius lived there afterwards he returned to Rome as heir to Augustus in two AD. Pliny said the Laocoön was in his fourth dimension at the palace of Titus (qui est in Titi imperatoris domo), then heir to his begetter Vespasian,^[68] merely the location of Titus's residence remains unknown; the imperial estate of the Gardens of Maecenas may be a plausible candidate. If the Laocoön group was already in the location of the later findspot by the time Pliny saw information technology, it might take arrived at that place under Maecenas or any of the emperors.^[66] The extent of the grounds of Nero's Domus Aurea is at present unclear, just they do not appear to take extended so far n or due east, though the newly rediscovered findspot-location is not very far beyond them.^[69]

Notes [edit]

1. ^ ^{a b} Digital Sculpture Project: Laocoön, "Catalogue Entry: Laocoon Group"
2. ^ Beard, 209
3. ^ The Capitoline Wolf was until recently idea to be the aforementioned statue praised by Pliny, but recent tests suggest it is medieval.
4. ^ Spivey, 25
5. ^ Spivey, 28–29
6. ^ Darwin, Charles (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. New York: D. Appleton & Company. p. 183. Retrieved 25 Dec 2016.
7. ^ Spivey, 25 (Darwin), 121–122
8. ^ ^{a b} Boardman, 199
9. ^ Clark, 219–221 was an early on proponent of this view; meet also Barkan, caption opp. p 1, Janson etc
10. ^ Boardman, 199 says "most 200 BC"; Spivey, 26, 36, feels it may have been commissioned by Titus.
11. ^ ^{a b} Howard, 422
12. ^ Howard, throughout; "Chronology", and several discussions in the other sources
13. ^ Boardman, 199, also Sperlonga und Vergil by Roland Hampe; merely run across Smith, 109 for the opposite view.
14. ^ Smith, 109
15. ^ Stewart, 85, this last in the commentary on Virgil of Maurus Servius Honoratus, citing Euphorion of Chalcis
16. ^ William Smith, Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography and Mythology, Taylor and Walton, 1846, p. 776
17. ^ The Greeks were familiar with constricting snakes, and the pocket-sized boa Eryx jaculus is even so native to Greece. But the danger to Ancient Greeks from venomous snakes was far greater
18. ^ Farinella, 16
19. ^ Stewart, 78
20. ^ Boardman, 164–166, 197–199; Clark, 216–219; Cook, 153
21. ^ ^{a b} Cook, 153
22. ^ English text at Tufts, Book 36, Ch 4, but usually cited as 36:37, e.grand. past Spivey, 26. Latin text: "...nec deinde multo plurium fama est, quorundam claritati in operibus eximiis obstante numero artificum, quoniam nec unus occupat gloriam nec plures pariter nuncupari possunt, sicut in laocoonte, qui est in titi imperatoris domo, opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae artis praeferendum. ex uno lapide eum ac liberos draconumque mirabiles nexus de consilii sententia fecere summi artifices Hagesander et Polydorus et Athenodorus rhodii." Naturalis Historia. Pliny the Elderberry. Karl Friedrich Theodor Mayhoff. Lipsiae. Teubner. 1906, as 36:11, at Tufts. The give-and-take statuariae used by Pliny means bronze statues every bit opposed to rock, every bit pointed out past Bernard Andreae and others. Come across Isager, 171
23. ^ Equally Bristles, 210, a sceptic, complains; run across "Chronology" at January 1506 for dissidents
24. ^ ^{a b} Stewart, Andrew W. (1996), "Hagesander, Athanodorus and Polydorus", in Hornblower, Simon, Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Printing.
25. ^ Boardman, 199; Smith, 109–110
26. ^ Isager, 173
27. ^ Howard 417–418 and effigy 1 has the fullest account used of the complicated situation here; with the damages and after the diverse restorations he lists xiv parts (417, note 4) when the grouping was terminal dismantled. See also Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön – alternative claims in the interpretation of artworks, University of California Printing, 2000, p. 29
28. ^ Rose, Herbert Jennings (1996), "Laocoön", in Hornblower, Simon (ed.), Oxford Classical Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford Academy Printing
29. ^ Spivey, 26; see too Isager, 173, who translates it "past decision of the [imperial] council".
30. ^ Rice, 239, with photo on 238
31. ^ See Rice or Agesander
32. ^ Herrmann, 277
33. ^ Rice, 235–236
34. ^ Rice, 239–242
35. ^ In 2005 Lynn Catterson argued that the sculpture was a forgery created by Michelangelo, in Catterson, Lynn, "Michelangelo's 'Laocoön?'" Artibus et historiae. 52 2005: 29. Richard Vivid, author of My Laocoön, described Catterson'south claims as "noncredible on whatever count". Encounter An Ancient Masterpiece Or a Chief'southward Forgery?, New York Times, April xviii, 2005
36. ^ Barkan, 1–4, with English text; Chronology has the Italian, at 1567, the date of the letter.
37. ^ Cryptic due to a quirk of Tuscan Italian, "anybody started to eat lunch" ci tornammo a desinare – see Barkan lecture notes PDF Archived 2012-04-eighteen at the Wayback Machine for 2011 Jerome Lectures, University of Chicago, "Unswept Flooring: Nutrient Culture and Loftier Culture, Antiquity and Renaissance", Lecture 1, start: "It's a piece of sixteenth-century spelling, and I (along with many other commentators – if I was wrong, I wasn't incorrect alone) – understood it every bit disegnare, that is, to draw ...[rather than] digiunare – in other words, to swallow lunch." Farinelli, sixteen, has "And having seen information technology we went back to dinner, talking ..."
38. ^ Chronology, 1504–1510
39. ^ Chronology, 1798–1816
40. ^ Howard, 417–420
41. ^ Howard, 418–419, 422
42. ^ Barkan, 7–eleven
43. ^ Barkan, 7–ten
44. ^ Chronology; Barkan, 9–eleven
45. ^ Liverani, Paolo, Digital Sculpture Project, "Catalogue"; Chronology, 1957
46. ^ See Bristles, 210, who is highly sceptical of the identification, noting that 'the new arm does non straight join with the father's broken shoulder (a wedge of plaster has had to be inserted); it appears to be on a smaller scale and in a slightly differently coloured marble'. On the wedge, Barkan, eleven notes that in the restoration of c. 1540 "the original shoulder was severely sliced back" to fit the new section.
47. ^ See figures in Howard for photos and diagram of the dis-assembled pieces
48. ^ ^{a b} Howard, 422 and 417 quoted in turn. Encounter also "Chronology" at 1959
49. ^ "Chronology" at 1968–70
50. ^ Barkan, xiii–16, and on the Torso, 197–201; Spivey, 121–123; Clark, 236–237
51. ^ Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael, p. 74, Yale, 1983, ISBN 0-300-03061-4
52. ^ Barkan, 10
53. ^ Barkan, xi–eighteen; Spivey, 125
54. ^ Barkan, 13–16; H. W. Janson, "Titian'due south Laocoon Caricature and the Vesalian-Galenist Controversy", The Art Bulletin, Vol. 28, No. ane (Mar., 1946), pp. 49–53; Clark, 390–391 rejects Janson'due south theory every bit to the meaning.
55. ^ Jelbert, Rebecca: "Aping the Masters?: Michelangelo and the Laocoön Group." Journal of Art Offense, event 22 (Fall/ Wintertime 2019), pp. 3–16.
56. ^ Spivey, 125–127
57. ^ Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001.08.34, review of Richard Brilliant, My Laocoön: Culling Claims.
58. ^ Gustafson, Susan, Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz and Goethe by Simon Richter, South Atlantic Review, Vol. 58, No. 4 (November., 1993), pp. 145–147, JSTOR 3201020
59. ^ "Laocoon and the expression of pain" Archived 2013-10-05 at the Wayback Machine, William Schupbach, Wellcome Trust
60. ^ Upon The Laocoon By Johann Goethe from Essays on Art, translated by Sameul Gray Ward (1862) p. 26
61. ^ Blake'south comments
62. ^ The Rescue by Greenough
63. ^ ^{a b c} Ruskin, John (1872). Modern Painters. Vol. 3. New York: J. Wiley. pp. 68–69.
64. ^ Towards a New Laocoon, Henry Moore Plant
65. ^ Volpe and Parisi; Beard, 211 complains of vagueness
66. ^ ^{a b c} Volpe and Parisi
67. ^ Volpe and Parisi; the map is Giambattista Nolli's Nuova Pianta di Roma, department prototype hither, the house shown with a zig-zag program to the top left of the section.
68. ^ Volpe and Parisi; the text probably reflects tidying by Pliny the Younger, as his father died (25 August 79) at Pompeii just two months subsequently Vespasian died (23 June 79) and Titus became Imperator rather than Caesar, his title equally heir.
69. ^ Warden, 275, approximate map of the grounds is fig. iii

References [edit]

• Barkan, Leonard, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, 1999, Yale University Press, ISBN 0-300-08911-2, 978-0-300-08911-0
• Beard, Mary, Times Literary Supplement, "Arms and the Man: The restoration and reinvention of classical sculpture", 2 February 2001, subscription required, reprinted in Against the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations, 2013 EBL ebooks online, Profile Books, ISBN i-84765-888-i, 978-ane-84765-888-3Google Books
• Boardman, John ed., The Oxford History of Classical Art, 1993, OUP, ISBN 0-xix-814386-nine
• "Chronology": Frischer, Bernard, Digital Sculpture Project: Laocoon, "An Annotated Chronology of the "Laocoon" Statue Grouping", 2009
• Clark, Kenneth, The Nude, A Study in Ideal Form, orig. 1949, various edns, folio refs from Pelican edn of 1960
• Cook, R.Chiliad., Greek Art, Penguin, 1986 (reprint of 1972), ISBN 0-14-021866-i
• Farinella, Vincenzo, Vatican Museums, Classical Art, 1985, Scala
• Haskell, Francis, and Penny, Nicholas, 1981. Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (Yale University Printing), cat. no. 52, pp. 243–47
• Herrmann, Ariel, review of Sperlonga und Vergil past Roland Hampe, The Fine art Bulletin, Vol. 56, No. two, Medieval Issue (Jun., 1974), pp. 275–277, JSTOR 3049235
• Howard, Seymour, "Laocoon Rerestored", American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 93, No. iii (Jul., 1989), pp. 417–422, JSTOR 505589
• Isager, Jacob, Pliny on Art and Society: The Elder Pliny'south Chapters On The History Of Art, 2013, Routledge, ISBN 1-135-08580-3, 978-1-135-08580-3, Google Books
• Rice, E. Eastward., "Prosopographika Rhodiaka", The Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 81, (1986), pp. 209–250, JSTOR 30102899
• Spivey, Nigel (2001), Enduring Creation: Art, Pain, and Fortitude, University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-23022-ane, 978-0-520-23022-4
• Smith, R.R.R., Hellenistic Sculpture, a handbook, Thames & Hudson, 1991, ISBN 0500202494
• Stewart, A., "To Entertain an Emperor: Sperlonga, Laokoon and Tiberius at the Dinner-Tabular array", The Periodical of Roman Studies, Vol. 67, (1977), pp. 76–90, JSTOR 299920
• "Volpe and Parisi": Digital Sculpture Project: Laocoon. "Laocoon: The Last Enigma", translation by Bernard Frischer of Volpe, Rita and Parisi, Antonella, "Laocoonte. L'ultimo engima," in Archeo 299, January 2010, pp. 26–39
• Warden, P. Gregory, "The Domus Aurea Reconsidered", Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. forty, No. 4 (Dec., 1981), pp. 271–278, doi:10.2307/989644, JSTOR 989644

External links [edit]

External video
Laocoön and his Sons at Smarthistory.

• University of Virginia's Digital Sculpture Project 3D models, bibliography, annotated chronology of the Laocoon
• Laocoon photos
• Laocoon and his Sons in the Census database
• FlickR group "Responses To Laocoön", a collection of art inspired by the Laocoön grouping
• Lessing's Laocoon etext on books.google.com
• Loh, Maria H. (2011). "Outscreaming the Laocoön: Sensation, Special Affects, and the Moving Image". Oxford Art Journal. 34 (3): 393–414. doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcr039. Archived from the original on 2 May 2015. Retrieved half-dozen December 2015.
• Laocoonte: variazioni sul mito, con una Galleria delle fonti letterarie e iconografiche su Laocoonte, a cura del Centro studi classicA, "La Rivista di Engramma" due north. fifty, luglio/settembre 2006 (in Italian)
• Nota sul ciclo di Sperlonga due east sulle relazioni con il Laoocoonte Vaticano, a cura del Centro studi classicA, "La Rivista di Engramma" n. 50. luglio/settembre 2006 (in Italian)
• Nota sulle interpretazioni del passo di Plinio, Nat. Hist. XXXVI, 37, a cura del Centro studi classicA, "La Rivista di Engramma" due north. 50. luglio/settembre 2006 (in Italian)
• Scheda cronologica dei restauri del Laocoonte, a cura di Marco Gazzola, "La Rivista di Engramma" n. 50, luglio/settembre 2006 (in Italian)
• Texts on Wikisource:
  • Laocoön by William Blake, with the texts transcribed

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laoco%C3%B6n_and_His_Sons

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