Laocoön Group
On 14 January 1506, 515 years ago, among the ruins of the Baths of Titus in Rome, the sculpture of Laocoon was found, an exceptional work that impressed enormously Renaissance artists, especially Michelangelo, who called him “a portent of art“. How about discovering more of this exceptional masterpiece?
Ancient history
In ancient Greece, in the Hellenistic period, some polis, including Rhodes, Pergamum and Alexandria, had an exceptional artistic flowering, able to renew the traditional expressive language. In Rhodes, in particular, an appreciable school of artists was established, whose production of works in bronze and marble is remembered. Among these, an undisputed masterpiece is considered the sculptural group of the Laocoon.
The work, signed by Aghesandro, Polydoro and Athenodoro, was for a long time considered a Hellenistic original. This is based on what Pliny reported in his Naturalis Historia, who claimed to have been able to admire it in the house of Emperor Titus:
“Nor is the fame of the majority very much, the number of artists opposing the freedom of certain remarkable works, because not one receives the glory nor can several be equally cited, as in Laoconte, which is in the palace of the emperor Tito, a work that is to be placed before all things of art both for painting and for sculpture. From a single block by mutual agreement the great artists Agesandro, Polidoro and Atanodoro di Rodi made him and his sons and the wonderful intertwining of snakes”
(Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, XXXVI, 37)
Currently, modern critics have considered this splendid sculptural group an excellent copy of the Tiberian age, of a bronze original from the 2nd century BC, made by a workshop of excellent copyists who usually sign their works.
The subject
The work represented a famous literary theme, taken from the epic cycle of the Trojan War and subsequently taken up by Virgil’s Aeneid: the drama of the Trojan priest, Laocoon and his sons, Antifate and Timbreo, represented dying between the coils of two deadly sea snakes. The reason for this atrocious death by crushing? The priest’s attempt to prevent access to the city of Troy of the famous wooden horse, designed by Odysseus, which contained enemy Achaean soldiers hidden inside.
(LA)
«Aut haec in nostros fabricata est machina muros
Inspectura domos venturaque desuper urbi,
Aut aliquis latet error: equo ne credite, Teucri.
Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes.»
(IT)
«This a machine raised against our walls,
and will spy on the houses, and on the city he will weigh:
there is certainly a deception. Do not trust, Trojans.
Happen it what he wants, I fear the Greeks, and more when they offer gifts.»
(Comment by Laocoon in front of the Trojans; Publius Virgil Marone, Aeneid, book II, verses 46-49)
Laocoon shouts throwing a spear at the wooden belly of the horse, trying to avoid the inevitable. And in response, Athena, goddess sided with the Greeks, punishes him by sending against him Porcete and Caribea, two enormous sea snakes, which come out of the sea cling to his children and then him, rushed with the intent to free them, crushing them to death.
The Trojans, for their part, interpreted this dramatic event as a sign of divine anger, as they had been convinced by the young Achaean Siron that the horse was actually a gift to the goddess Athena, and therefore Laocoon had been punished for striking it, thus committing a sacrilegious act… We all know how it ended, don’t we? The Trojans carried the horse inside the city walls and during the night the Achaean soldiers hidden within it, surprised the Teucian inhabitants who were celebrating the end of the ten-year war, killed the guards and opened the city gates to their companions. Troy was so set on fire and its inhabitants killed or enslaved.
The finding
The magnificent sculptural group was found in 1506 by digging in a vineyard owned by Felice de Fredis, located on the Oppio hill, near Nero’s Domus Aurea.
The important find will also be mentioned in the epitaph by de Fredis himself, located in the prestigious Church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli, which reads:
“Girolama Branca, wife and mother, and Giulia de Fredis de Milizi, daughter and sister, in the year of the Lord 1529 very sad, they placed (this plaque) to Felice de Fredis, who deserved immortality for his virtues and for rediscovered, divine, almost yearning simulacrum of Laocoon, whom you admire in the Vatican, and to Frederick, who possessed the paternal and ancestral qualities of soul, reached prematurely by too immature death.”
According to the chronicles of the time, the excavation, of astonishing size, witnessed in person, among others, by the sculptor Michelangelo and the architect Giuliano da Sangallo. Based on a testimony by Francesco, Giuliano’s son, we learn that the father had been sent by the pope precisely with the aim of evaluating the discovery, and it was by Sangallo who reconnected the still partially buried fragments with the sculpture cited by Pliny the Elder.
The location at the Belvedere and the birth of the Vatican Museums
After a short time, the statue was purchased by Pope Julius II della Rovere, a passionate classicist, to be exhibited, in a prominent position, in the “Courtyard of the Statues” designed by Bramante within the complex of the Belvedere Garden, a place designed to accommodate the important papal collection of ancient sculpture.
This exhibition is considered as the founding act of the Vatican Museums. From that moment the Laocoonte, together with the Apollo of the Belvedere, constituted one of the most important pieces of the prestigious collection, and from that moment it was the subject of an incessant succession of visits, even at night, by various onlookers, artists and travelers.
Restorations and additions
At the time of discovery, the sculptural group, although in a good state of conservation, showed Laocoon and one of his sons, both without the right arm. After an initial restoration, perhaps carried out by Baccio Bandinelli, of his son’s arm, artists and experts began a relevant debate on the original appearance of the sculpture, and therefore on how the missing arm of the Trojan priest should appear. Despite some clues showing how this was originally bent behind Laocoon’s shoulder, the opinion prevailed that assumed the arm extended outwards, in a gesture full of pathos and strong dynamism.
A first true integration of the work, however, dates back to the period 1532-1533, the years in which Giovanni Agnolo Montorsoli, a pupil of Michelangelo, received from Pope Clement VII the task of restoring the antiquities of the Belvedere. This was expressed in the reproduction of an “outstretched arm”, probably in terracotta. The surgery was appreciated for a long time, so much so that Johann Joachim Winckelmann, although aware of the different original position of the limb, declared himself in favor of its maintenance.
On the other hand, Agostino Cornacchini’s restoration dates back to the two-year period 1725-1727, which in today’s terms could be defined as a conservative intervention, as part of a broader recovery action of the Belvedere which at the time was in severe degradation. Cornacchini replaced the ruined terracotta arm and the marble limbs of his sons by Montorsoli with others practically identical in pose.
A further interesting phase in the history of the restoration of the Laocoön Group is the French parenthesis. In 1798, following the Napoleonic campaigns, the marble group ended up in Paris, but arrives there without the anonymous restorations following the attempt to restore the sixteenth-century arm erroneously attributed to Michelangelo. In about 1720, in fact, a limb was found which most likely was Montorsoli’s sketch of the arm previously made in terracotta; an anonymous had remedied the invasive attempted integration of this discovery around 1780.
A competition is launched in Paris following the decision to proceed with a new restoration; in the meantime a cast of the arms of the Laocoon was ordered from the sculptor François Giradon of the École du Dessin. The fact that the competition goes deserted testifies to the initial awareness of the difficulty or the impossibility of intervening and modifying the image consolidated over the centuries of the most famous works of antiquity.
The work, which returned to the Vatican after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, saw the installation of plaster casts of the eighteenth-century additions present before leaving for the Louvre, but the new archaeological sensitivity began to perceive the gesture as a foreign and disturbing element excessively rhetorical and emphatic of the “outstretched arm”.
The last intervention in chronological order is represented by the philological restoration by Filippo Magi, in 1957, made possible by the recognition of Ernesto Vergara Caffarelli of the original arm of the Laocoon in the “Pollack arm” (found by chance in Rome by the homonymous scholar in 1905), which gives us the current configuration of the sculptural group.
Cultural influence
The discovery of the Laocoon had enormous resonance among artists and sculptors and significantly influenced Italian Renaissance art and in the following century Baroque sculpture. In fact, the attention aroused by the statue was extraordinary, and traces of it can be found in the numerous letters of the ambassadors who describe it, in the drawings and engravings that immediately afterwards began to circulate throughout Europe. The strong dynamism and heroic and tormented plasticity of the Laocoon inspired many artists, including Michelangelo, Titian, El Greco and Andrea del Sarto.
Many sculptors practiced on the sculptural group by making casts and copies even in full size. For example, we know that Cardinal Giulio de ‘Medici, the future Pope Clement VII, commissioned a copy of it from the Florentine sculptor Baccio Bandinelli, a work that you can admire today in the Uffizi. Even the king of France, Francis I, wanted to have a copy and for this reason, in 1540, he sent the Bolognese sculptor Francesco Primaticcio to Rome to make a cast in order to obtain a bronze reproduction to be destined for the castle of Fontainebleau.
The fascination of sculpture involved artists and intellectuals such as Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Orfeo Boselli, Winckelmann and Goethe for centuries, becoming the fulcrum of eighteenth-century reflection on sculpture.
Description and style of the work
The statuary group depicts Laocoon and his two sons Antiphates and Timbreo being crushed to death by two sea snakes, the punishment of the goddess Athena, who wished the victory of the Achaeans, against the Trojan priest, who had tried to oppose the entrance of the Trojan horse in the city.
It is a work full of pathos. Laocoon is represented half seated on a stone altar, in a suffering and desperate attitude, while he writhes in vain in an attempt to free himself and his children from the coils of lethal reptiles.
To his right, the younger son is depicted at the end of his strength, now close to death, while the other tries in vain to free himself by turning his head towards his father, probably looking for help.
Laocoon twists to his right as a snake deeply bites his left side. The spasm of pain contracts the priest’s face, his mouth is open, his gaze is turned pleadingly to the sky. The distorted features of his face, his massive build contrast with the fragility and weakness of the children who impotently implore paternal intervention: the scene arouses emotion and empathy in the soul of the beholder.
Expressiveness, combined with the representation of movement, is certainly one of the most characterizing traits of this Hellenistic work, which in many other ways still proves to be indebted to classical culture. It is unthinkable, in fact, that that muscular and athletic body could actually belong to an old priest.
Finally, it should be noted that the statue is composed of several distinct parts, this is in contrast with what is reported by Pliny, who instead described a sculpture obtained from a single block of marble (formerly a tombstone). Precisely this observation has generated and continues to generate various doubts about its identification and attribution.
Reading tips
by Lucas Russo
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Trained at the University of Turin, where she obtained her three-year degree in Cultural Heritage Sciences and her master's degree in History of Archaeological and Historical-Artistic Heritage, she specialized at the University of Milan, graduating in Archaeological Heritage. Freelancer, she deals with computer archeology and virtual heritage, museum displays, 2D graphics and multimedia products applied to cultural heritage. Collaborates with various public and private bodies in the field of projects related to the research, enhancement, communication and promotion of cultural heritage. She deals with the creation of cultural itineraries relating to the entire Italian Peninsula and the development of content (creation of texts and photographic production) for paper and virtual publications. Her study interests include the development of new techniques and means of communication for the enhancement of cultural heritage and the evolution of the symbolism of power between the Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
