LAOCOON, in the history of the arts, is a celebrated monument of Greek sculpture executed in marble by Polydorus, Athenodorus, and Agesander, the three famous artists of Rhodes. This remains of antiquity was found at Rome in the ruins of the palace of Titus, in the beginning of the sixteenth century, under the pontificate of Julius II. and since deposited in the Farnese palace. Laocoon, the priest of Apollo and Neptune, is here represented with his two sons, with two hideous serpents clinging round his body, gnawing it, and injecting their poison: Virgil has given us the following description of the fact:
Serpens amplexus uterque
Implicat, & miseros morfu deapiscitur artus.
Corripunt, spirisque ligant ingenibus, & jam
bis medium amplexi, bis collo squamea circum
Terga dant, superant capite & cerocibus altis.
This statue exhibits the most astonishing dignity and tranquillity of mind in the midst of the most excruciating torments: Pliny says of it, that is, opus omnibus picturae & statuarie artis, praeferendum.
The Laocoon, Dr Gillicryst observes, may be regarded as the triumph of Grecian sculpture; since bodily pain, the grossest and most ungovernable of all our passions, and that pain united with anguish and torture of mind, are yet expressed with such propriety and dignity, as afford lessons of fortitude superior to any taught in the schools of philosophy. The horrible shriek which Virgil's Laocoon emits is a proper circumstance for poetry, which speaks to the fancy by
images and ideas borrowed from all the senses, and has a thousand ways of ennobling its object; but the expression of this shriek would have totally degraded the statue. It is softened, therefore, into a patient sigh, with eyes turned to heaven in search of relief. The intolerable agony of suffering nature is represented in the lower part, and particularly in the extremities of the body; but the manly breast struggles against calamity. The contention is still more plainly perceived in his furrowed forehead; and his languishing paternal eye demands assistance, less for himself than for his miserable children, who look up to him for help.