LAOCOON, in the history of the arts, is a celebrated monument of Greek sculpture executed in marble by Agelander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, the three famous artists of Rhodes. Agelander is supposed to have been the father of the two latter. This remain 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 afterwards deposited in the Farnese palace. Laocoön, 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, et miseros morsu depascitur artus:—
Corripunt, spirisque ligant ingenibus, et jam
Bis medium amplexi, bis collo squamea circum
Terga danti, superant capite et cervicibus 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 it is, opus omnibus pictura et statuaria artis, preferendum.
When Italy was overrun by the French during the late revolution, this wonderful monument of ancient art was removed along with the celebrated Apollo Belvedere, &c. from the Vatican, where they had been seen and admired for 300 years, and placed in the Museum of Arts at Paris. "A hero, says the French account of the latter, guided by victory, drew it from the Vatican, and transporting it to the banks of the Seine, has fixed it there for ever."
The Laocoön, Dr. Gillies† 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 Laocoön 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 the 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 longish paternal eye demands assistance, lest for himself than for his miserable children, who look up to him for help.
The groupe of the Laocoön is composed of five pieces of marble, joined together with so much art and
neatness, that Pliny thought the whole was of one. Laodicea, Laomedon. The right arm of the father, and two of the arms of the children are wanting. The deficiency is supplied by arms moulded on the groupe in plaster of Paris.