One of the most surprising discoveries those Romans made when they began to dig in old Rome, looking for beautiful ruins, was the Laocoön. Michelangelo himself dropped what he was doing and hurried to see it lifted out of the dirt that had covered it for a thousand years.
Sculptural group from Hellenistic times showing the old priest and his sons being killed by snakes. Laocoön twists in agony and despair. But his body isn´t the miserable puppet or sack of sick-white flesh that the Italians of the Middle Ages might have made of him but the proud encarnation of the old gods, with all its noble “architecture” and dignity. It was the greatest example Michelangelo had ever seen of the sublime nude and it impressed him so much that there is a trace of this Laocoön in all his statues after the David.
Sculptural group from Hellenistic times showing the old priest and his sons being killed by snakes. Laocoön twists in agony and despair. But his body isn´t the miserable puppet or sack of sick-white flesh that the Italians of the Middle Ages might have made of him but the proud encarnation of the old gods, with all its noble “architecture” and dignity. It was the greatest example Michelangelo had ever seen of the sublime nude and it impressed him so much that there is a trace of this Laocoön in all his statues after the David.
"Laocoön" (circa 1610-14) by El Greco
"That hair-raising convergence of the mystical and the mundane runs irregularly but potently through 'El Greco to Velázquez: Art During the Reign of Philip III,' a rich, uneven stew of an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston."
Widespread interest in the story of Laocoön, a mythical priest of Troy, developed after an ancient, monumental sculpture representing him and his two sons was unearthed in 1506 in Rome. Suspecting trickery, Laocoön had warned his countrymen not to accept the wooden horse left outside Troy by the Greeks and had hurled his spear at it to prove that it was hollow. Thus the priest incurred the wrath of the gods, for desecrating an object dedicated to the goddess Athena. El Greco depicted serpents, sent by the angry gods, engaging Laocoön and one son in a mortal struggle, while a second son lies already dead at his father's side. The identity of the unfinished figures on the right continues to be debated; perhaps they represent the gods themselves supervising their vengeance.
Did El Greco intend to relate this mythical theme of conflict and divine retribution to the Inquisition then raging in Toledo? Whatever the case, the story of Laocoön is the only classical theme he is known to have painted.
Widespread interest in the story of Laocoön, a mythical priest of Troy, developed after an ancient, monumental sculpture representing him and his two sons was unearthed in 1506 in Rome. Suspecting trickery, Laocoön had warned his countrymen not to accept the wooden horse left outside Troy by the Greeks and had hurled his spear at it to prove that it was hollow. Thus the priest incurred the wrath of the gods, for desecrating an object dedicated to the goddess Athena. El Greco depicted serpents, sent by the angry gods, engaging Laocoön and one son in a mortal struggle, while a second son lies already dead at his father's side. The identity of the unfinished figures on the right continues to be debated; perhaps they represent the gods themselves supervising their vengeance.
Did El Greco intend to relate this mythical theme of conflict and divine retribution to the Inquisition then raging in Toledo? Whatever the case, the story of Laocoön is the only classical theme he is known to have painted.
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