LAOCOON: STILL STRUGGLING WITH THOSE SERPENTS

LAOCOÖN: STILL STRUGGLING WITH THOSE SERPENTS

STATUE OF THE MONTH: APRIL 2020

In the January of 1506, a young boy called Francesco was invited to accompany his father on an unusual outing - to see some ancient statues which had just been unearthed in a vineyard on the Esquiline Hill in Rome. Francesco’s father Guiliano da Sangallo was architect to Pope Julius II, a keen collector of ancient art (he already owned the Apollo Belvedere, subject of a previous blog), and it was the Pope who had asked him to appraise this exciting new find. Guiliano decided to invite their lodger, Michelangelo (yes, the Michelangelo, and I’m not talking about the turtle) to tag along as well.  This outing left such a deep impression on Francesco that he was still able to recall the details sixty years later: ‘When we reached the place where the statues were standing, my father said at once, “This is the Laocoön mentioned by Pliny!”      

The reason Francesco’s dad got so excited is that the statue they were looking at appeared to be the very statue which Pliny the Elder had described as the best sculpture ever: ‘a work that must be considered superior to all other products of the arts of painting and sculpture.’  Pliny said that he’d seen the statue in the palace of his patron, the Emperor Titus; that it had been cut from a single block of marble; and that it had been created by a family of sculptors from Rhodes: Hagesandros and his two sons, Polydorus and Athenodorus. 

              My miniature resin copy of the Laocoön                              Ashmolean cast of the Laocoön

With a pedigree like this, Pope Julius II couldn’t resist the chance to own the statue, fighting off stiff competition to purchase it from the vineyard’s owner. By the summer it had been installed in its own niche in the Belvedere courtyard, near the Apollo Belvedere.  It went on to become the most famous statue in the Western world, although I think it’s fair to say that it’s probably now been overtaken by the Venus de Milo or (rather ironically) Michelangelo’s David.    

The Myth

The statue depicts Laocoön and his two sons being attacked by giant serpents. In Greek myth, Laocoön was a Trojan priest who was punished for an act of hubris committed against the gods, although the exact nature of his crime was a bit hazy: Sophocles, in a lost tragedy, presented Laocoön as a priest who had broken his vows of celibacy; in another version, he was punished for having sex with his wife in a temple of Apollo, thus ‘polluting’ the temple (in the religious sense of the word). In all these versions of the myth, Laocoön was punished soon after the appearance of the Trojan Horse, left by the Greeks outside the walls of Troy as an offering to the gods. In the lost epic The Sack of Ilium (the poem which Nero supposedly sang during the Great Fire of Rome in AD 64) the poet Arctinus described how ‘two serpents appeared and destroyed Laocoön and one of his two sons’ – some art historians have suggested that the sculpture illustrates Arctinus’ version of the story, as one of the two boys looks as though he might be able to escape from the serpents’ coils. 

In these Greek versions of the story, Laocoön was punished for a crime which was unconnected with the Trojan Horse; however, in the most famous version of the story, in Book 2 of the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil explicitly connected the two events. This section of the poem is engraved on my memory, as I had to learn it, in Latin, for my O-level exam back in 1977 (OK, I’m showing my age here). In Virgil’s version, Laocoön berates his fellow-Trojans for being so naïve as to think the Greeks have left the horse as a present for the gods (the origin of the famous line about not trusting ‘Greeks bearing gifts’). He correctly guesses that the wooden horse conceals some sort of trick: ‘I tell you, there are Greeks hiding in here, shut up in all this wood, or else it is a siege engine designed for use against our walls.’ To prove his point, he throws a spear at the horse, making him the only Trojan to damage the ‘offering’ left by the Greeks.

Shortly after his attack on the Horse, while Laocoön is sacrificing a bull to Neptune at an altar on the beach, two sea-serpents with ‘blood-red crests’ come gliding across the sea, making for the shore, ‘coil upon measureless coil.’ They make straight for Laocoön’s sons; as their father vainly tries to rescue them, ‘they seized him and bound him in huge spirals … all the time he was raising horrible cries to heaven like the bellowing of a wounded bull.’  After crushing Laocoön and his boys to death, the two serpents seek refuge under the huge shield of a statue of Athene. The message is clear: the gods have punished Laocoön for his act of hubris in damaging the wooden horse. Any doubts the Trojans might have had are now assuaged, and they joyfully bring the horse into their city, thus sealing their own fate. 

When was it made?

This raises a question which has occupied art historians for many years: which came first – the Aeneid or the marble statue?  If the statue was inspired by Virgil’s poem, that would mean that it must have been created sometime after 19 BC, the year when Virgil died, leaving instructions to burn the manuscript of the Aeneid (his executors disobeyed these instructions). If this was the case, then the statue was presumably created at some point during the 1^st century AD, possibly as a commission for Augustus, his successor Tiberius or even Titus himself.  The back part of the altar is made from Italian marble (Bert Smith has identified this as Luna or Carrara marble), which would support the view that it was made during the period when Greece was part of the Roman Empire, rather than during the (earlier) Hellenistic period. 

The argument for a 1^st century AD date was strengthened in 1957 by the discovery of several groups of statues, in a cave at Sperlonga in Italy, which has been identified as the grotto where the Emperor Tiberius used to enjoy holding lunch-parties. One of these groups, depicting Odysseus’ encounter with the monster Scylla, was signed by the same three sculptors to whom Pliny attributed the Laocoön: Hagesandros and his sons Polydorus and Athenodorus.  Whilst most art historians now agree that our Laocoön does date from the 1^st century AD, its similarity in style to the Pergamene Altar (now in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, and well worth a visit) suggests that it was probably based on an earlier 3rd or 2nd century sculpture from the Hellenistic period. Bert Smith’s conclusion is that the three sculptors from Rhodes specialised in the ‘high-class reproduction of Hellenistic mythological groups’.  If we accept that our Laocoön is based on an earlier Hellenistic sculpture, then that would mean that it couldn't have been influenced by Virgil's version, and instead reflects the earlier idea that Laocoön is being punished for a crime other than damaging the Wooden Horse.    

Why did it become so famous?

As soon as it was discovered, this statue gained kudos from Pliny's claim that it surpassed all other statues. It was also unique: unlike other ancient statues which have survived in several copies (such as Myron's Discobolos, or Discus-thrower), there is only one Laocoön. The timing of the discovery was also crucial, as it occurred at a crucial point during the Renaissance, when interest in Classical art was really hotting up; Pope Julius II’s decision to display it in his Belvedere Court gave it the seal of quality (definitely no second-rate pieces there); and bronze casts and marble copies were already being disseminated across the royal courts of Europe within twenty years of the statue’s discovery. Engravings and prints began to appear as early as the 16^th century, sometimes placing Laocoön in the dramatic setting of the beach at Troy. Grand Tourists could visit the original statue at the Vatican, or could draw the life-size cast in the collection of the French Academy at Rome. The Laocoön was also one of the very first Classical sculptures to make it to the Americas, albeit in the form of a plaster cast brought to Boston by a portrait painter called John Smibert in 1729. 

            Giovanni Paolo Panini, Ancient Rome (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
                - note the Laocoön in the bottom right-hand corner, as part of a fantasy collection of
                  ancient art and sculpture (there's a Dying Gaul in there as well)

Winckelmann, the art historian who first developed a chronology for ancient art, was lavish in his praise of the statue, and his views were parroted in endless published accounts of ‘my travels in Italy’. It became a fixture on lists of ‘the top seven sculptures’ or ‘top ten antiquities.’ Tourists overwhelmed by the presence of so much art in Rome could be reassured that this statue really was top-notch; it always received the maximum number of asterisks or exclamation marks, depending on which guidebook you read. In 1798 it was taken (along with the Apollo Belvedere) was taken to France as a piece of war booty under the terms of the Treaty of Tolentino (1797), but the seventeen years it spent on display in Paris only served to widen its audience and increase its prestige.  Miniature copies were available in a range  of materials: lead, bronze, terracotta, even precious stones like amethyst and agate; you could even buy a version from the Capodimonte porcelain factory in Naples with purple drapery and lurid green snakes. 

Poets couldn’t resist the statue; Lord Byron’s verse on the Laocoön can hardly be described as one of his best efforts, but it’s fun to see him raiding his mental thesaurus for synonyms for ‘snake’: 

                                                                                    - Vain

                        The struggle; vain, against the coiling strain

And gripe, and deepening of the dragon’s grasp,

The old man’s clench: the long envenom’d chain

Rivets the living links – the enormous asp

Enforces pang on pang, and stifles gasp on gasp

(Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Canto IV. CLX)

The statue was so well-known that it became the source of parody: a Venetian woodcut showed three monkeys assuming the poses of Laocoön and his sons. Dickens, likening Scrooge to Laocoön as he struggled with his stockings in A Christmas Carol, could be confident that his British readers would understand the reference (see Haskell & Penny, Taste & the Antique)

Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Sculpture Gallery in the Time of Augustus  

- a demonstration of the fame of the Laocoön in Victorian culture

Doubts

Doubts have been cast on the date and authenticity of the statue since its discovery in the 16^th century.  It was realised very early that the statue had been created from seven blocks of marble, rather than a single block as Pliny had claimed. Winckelmann, defending Pliny, said that the joints were so fine that they wouldn't be evident on a casual scrutiny. Perhaps Pliny was simply repeating a ‘factoid’ he had been told on a visit to Titus’s palace; it may have been common to claim that a marble statue was ‘made from a single block’ in order to emphasise its virtuosity. It’s also possible that Pliny’s lavish praise of the statue owed something to the fact that Titus was his patron. Some scholars have also tried to argue that our statue isn’t the one that Pliny saw in Titus’s palace, but an ancient copy of that statue (Giuseppe Lugli argued in 1958 that the statue had turned up in the wrong place, as Titus’ house was on the Quirinal hill, not the Esquiline). 

As early as the 18^th century, the painter Anton Raphael Mengs was prepared to knock the statue off its metaphorical pedestal by suggesting that it, like the Apollo Belvedere, was probably a Roman copy of a lost Greek original. The statue wasn’t intact when it was discovered; the older son (the one on our right or Laocoön’s left) had become separated from the other two figures, and there is still controversy over how he should be positioned relative to the other figures. The 16^th century reconstruction involved lining the three figures up in a row (the photograph below shows this very clearly), but Mengs commissioned two casts which created a more pyramidal composition by turning the older son with his back to his father, and several modern scholars (including Seymour Howard) have supported Mengs's   reconstruction. 

                    Plaster cast in Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen, showing linear reconstruction

When the statue was first discovered, Laocoön’s right arm was missing, as was the younger son’s right arm, the older son’s right hand and some of the snake’s coils. A restoration carried out by Montorsoli (one of Michelangelo’s former assistants) in 1532 gave Laocoon a right arm which pointed up to the sky, as if challenging the gods, and it’s this version which appears in most of the casts and copies.  Not everyone agreed with Montorsoli's reconstruction: another  16th century sculptor, Sansovino, created a small bronze version, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, with the right arm bent back towards the head. Amazingly, in 1905 the original arm turned up (in an antique shop on the Esquiline), proving that it was indeed bent back rather than pointing upwards; in 1957 the original arm was added to the statue in the Vatican, replacing the speculative restoration.

 
Left:  Drawing of the Laocoon from T B L Webster's Hellenistic Art, showing the right arm bent back

Right: Ashmolean cast of the Laocoon, showing the
16th century reconstruction with raised right arm


Another suggestion which occasionally pops up is that our Laocoön isn’t an ancient statue at all, but a forgery by Michelangelo – who, as you might remember, was one of the first people to examine the statue and identify it as the work mentioned by Pliny. Michelangelo certainly did experiment with methods of artificially ageing statues, by burying them and/or painting them with yoghurt, and he had form when it came to forging  ‘antiquities’.  The American art historian Lynn Catterson has put forward a case for Michelangelo forging the Laocoön, pointing out that its discovery in the vineyard was a bit fortuitous given that Julius II was known to be on the hunt for this particular statue.  

Despite all the doubts that have been raised over the years, I have to say that this is my favourite ancient statue, even though I accept that it’s not particularly realistic. As usually the case with Greek sculpture, the two boys look like adults who’ve shrunk in the wash. For a culture so well-versed in the creation of hybrid monsters, the snakes don’t look terribly scary and the snake’s bite is hardly convincing anatomically. Laocoon himself looks as if he’s more interested in ranting at the gods and striking a dramatic pose than he is in saving his kids. But so what? It’s an absolutely incredible piece of group sculpture: the triangular composition’s interesting, the workmanship’s fantastic, and as soon as you see it you can tell what’s happening, even if you don’t know the story. There’s more than enough sculpture which shows ‘nude man standing still’ (even if the nude man in question might be Apollo); the Laocoön, by contrast, is an extravagantly over-the-top piece of baroque sculpture, and – dare I say - all the better for it. Whenever I visit the Ashmolean Cast Gallery in Oxford I always make a bee-line for the cast of this sculpture: it’s positioned to catch a shaft of sunlight right onto Laocoön’s face, as he grimaces and rants at the gods who’ve plotted his destruction. 

Detail of Laocoön cast in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 

                               Laocoön in needlepoint, designed and created by Souzan Alcorn

Where to see it

The original marble statue is still in the Vatican Museum.  Copies and casts can be found in:

Uffizi Gallery, Florence  (the earliest marble copy, from 1523)

Louvre, Paris (Primaticcio’s bronze cast which originally stood at Fontainebleau)

Versailles (marble copy)

Victoria & Albert Museum (small bronze copy by Sansovino, with Laocoön’s right

arm correctly restored)

Manchester City Art Gallery, Mosley Street, Manchester (small bronze version)

Ashmolean Cast Gallery, Oxford (plaster cast)
Crawford Cast Gallery Cork (plaster cast, recently restored)

Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen (plaster cast)

Tsvetaev Cast Collection, Pushkin Museum, Moscow (plaster cast)

www.digitalsculpture.org offers three-dimensional views of the statue, enabling you to view it from lots of different angles

References & Further Reading

Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 36.37 (Penguin Classics, 1991)

Virgil, Aeneid (quotes are taken from David West’s Penguin Classics translation, 1991)

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), English 

                   translation by Edward Allen McCormick (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984)

Francis Haskell & Nicholas Penny, Taste & the Antique (Yale University Press, 1981)

R R R Smith, Hellenistic Sculpture (Thames & Hudson, 1991)

T B L Webster, Hellenistic Sculpture (Methuen, 1996)