Laocoön

Author: Surya Stemerding

This drawing is of the Hellenistic statue of Laocoön and his two sons being attacked by sea serpents. The sculpture was unearthed in 1506 and is now in the Vatican Museum. Laocoön was a Trojan priest who tried in vain to warn the residents of Troy against the wooden horse with which the Greeks would go on to destroy the city. According to Greek mythology, he and his sons Antiphantes and Thymbraeus were punished by the sea god Poseidon, who set two sea serpents on them. After a dramatic fight with the serpents, all three were killed.

As it is in the statue, one of Laocoön’s arms is missing in the drawing, and for this reason it was originally attributed to Marco Dente (1493-1527), the artist of an engraving in which Laocoön likewise misses an arm.^[1] In that print, however, the sons’ arms are also missing, the coils of the serpents are different and the group is shown from a lower viewpoint. This means that the drawing probably has nothing to do with the engraving.

The absence of Laocoön’s arm in the drawing indicates that it was probably done before 1532. In that year the sculpture was drastically restored and Laocoön’s missing arm was added in a position that is now known not to have been the original.^[2] Earlier, in 1510 and 1520, reconstructions of the missing arm were made in wax by the sculptors Jacopo Sansovino (1486-1570) and Baccio Bandinelli (1488-1560) respectively. These reconstructions have meanwhile been lost. Commissioned by the pope, in 1520-25, Bandinelli also made a marble copy of the Laocoön group, which is now in the Uffizi in Florence.^[3] In that one the sons’ arms have been completed, too, something that was probably also done to the group in the Vatican around 1520.^[4]

It is the fact that the group is not yet standing on the base on which it was placed in 1510-11 that chiefly points to an earlier date for the drawing.^[5] The Rotterdam sheet is thus one of only three drawings of the Laocoön group that date from before or around 1510.^[6] The earliest is a drawing by Giovanni Antonio da Brescia (1460-1525), made not long after the excavation. It is quite clear that the damaged statue has been propped up temporarily.^[7] Another drawing, probably by Marcantonio Raimondi (c.1480-c.1534) and likewise dated around 1510, is in Budapest.^[8] The Rotterdam drawing differs from these two, showing, as it does, the sons with arms. The artist evidently reconstructed them on the basis of the positions of the still intact parts of the limbs.