The Laocoon Groups

After watching the video that my professor post it on YouTube, I have seen deal of images about Egyptian, Greek and Roman art. Many of the images have their own unique meaning, theme and style. What caught my attention was viewing the living sculpture of the human body, mythological creatures and finally god like figures, but what was I interesting the most was how these sculpture figure can contain a simple story just using every part of the body. Of course Egyptian have their own unique style of showing the symbolism and humanism. On the other hand I am in favor of Roman/ Greek art by truly capture the figurines and then build them into life size statutes. 

          The Greek sculpture, "Laocoon and his Sons" or "The Laocoon Group", shows the image of a Trojan priest named Laocoon and his two sons, Antiphas and Thymbraeus being killed by two serpents. The background of this sculpture shows that the Trojan priest had angered the Greek God by warning of the danger that the city of Troy faced. Upon the Trojan wooden horse entering the city, soldiers were carried inside of the wooden horse.

         The analysis of the Laocoon group will be dealing with how this sculpture was able to show face expression, size, body movement and symbolism. The sculpture was built in the 16 century, Rome. The sculpture was made out of marble and the Dimension of this figure determines to be over 2m (6 ft. 7in) in height. After searching for this sculpture there have been multiple articles about the true nature of this sculpture purpose. The figure of Laocoon is projecting a struggle with the two serpents catching a hold of him and his sons. It shows the priest's facial expression is heading towards panicking and the same goes for the two sons. His body parts are being wrapped by the serpents, but not entirely. As you can see, Laocoon's left foot supports himself by touching the ground with the toes of his foot. The right leg is bent, touching the steps on the base of the altar. Using his right arm Laocoon grabs a hold on a part of the serpent, and the serpent’s body wraps his left arm. Laocoon grabs a hold of the serpent body, and by the looks of it the serpent has taken a fatal bite from his side. Laocoon's head is turned back with a grimace of pain as he has seen the horrifying death of his two sons struggling. To his right the younger son is completely enwrapped by the serpent and to the left the elder brother is turning his head looking at his father while seeing the fear and horror that the elder brother faces upon death. 

         For symbolism a god was angry at the Priest for warning the people about the Trojan attack, the God sent the serpents so that there would be no interference. The Greek God, Apollo, was known to be the God of light. Apollo was the son of Zeus and Leto, twin brother of Artemis. According to Apollo side of his story, he had warned the Trojans not to accept the Greek's gift of the wooden horse. Serpent was seen as a positive image in Greek and roman literature. The two serpents were named either Porces and Chariboea or Curissia and Periboe.

 In the end I was interest of look up at this image and of course I wasn’t able to gather enough information of the this statue, but overall I did managed to learn some history into this fine art and I can see why this sculpture was so popular in the roman times.