Unchanged by any teller — how the centuries since have seen Laocoon.
The gallery
Laocoön and His Sons
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus, c. 40–30 BC
The Vatican marble group — priest and sons crushed by sea-serpents — is antiquity's most famous image of agony and the Renaissance's school of suffering. Virgil's warner who cried that he feared Greeks bearing gifts is silenced in stone so the horse can enter. Museo Pio-Clementino, Vatican Museums.
Laocoön
El Greco, c. 1610–1614
El Greco transplants the Trojan priest's death to a storm-lit Toledo landscape: elongated bodies writhe under the serpents while the wooden horse and a spectral city watch. Mannerist elongation turns Virgil's omen into apocalyptic vision. National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Laocoön
Francesco Hayez, 1812
Hayez's Neoclassical canvas restages the Vatican group's agony in paint — the priest and his sons locked with the serpents in a study of twisted anatomy and doomed warning. Romantic Italy looks back at the sculpture that taught Europe how to suffer on marble.
Laocoön and His Sons Bitten by Snakes
Pieter Soutman, c. 1610
Soutman's print after the ancient group spreads the priest's death across Europe as reproducible agony — coils, muscle, and open mouths in ink. The warner of Troy becomes a Baroque lesson in pathos for every print collector who owned a Laocoön.
In play
Laocoön and His Sons
The Vatican marble group — priest and sons crushed by sea-serpents — became antiquity's most famous image of agony and the Renaissance's school of suffering.
Laocoön
Laocoön endures as the warner who was right — "I fear the Greeks even when they bring gifts" — silenced by serpents so the horse could enter.