Laocoön and His Sons

A man throws his head back, mouth open, every muscle in his face straining as he cries out to gods who have already turned away. This face of suffering is carved from cold marble — one of the most famous in the history of art.

This is the Laocoön Group, a nearly life-sized marble of a Trojan priest and his two sons crushed by sea serpents. Laocoön had warned his people not to trust the Greeks' wooden horse, and for that warning the gods sent the snakes from the sea. Pliny credited three sculptors from Rhodes, though scholars still debate whether it is a Hellenistic Greek original or a Roman version.

Reading the group, figure by figure

The serpents wind through the whole composition, binding father and sons into a single, inescapable knot. Each figure carries its own note in the tragedy:

• The younger son sags at the father's side, his head falling back — carved softer and set lower so your eye reads his collapse before it grasps the whole scene.
• The elder son twists to pull a coil from his leg and turns to look back at his father. He may yet break free, but that glance is the heartbreak of the piece: hope and helplessness in a single turn of the head.
• The father braces his legs and twists his torso, ribs pulled taut — the human form pushed to the very edge of endurance.

The missing arm

When the statue was dug from a Roman vineyard in 1506, its right arm was gone. A young Michelangelo studied the work closely — its straining anguish echoes through his own sculpture and the wider Renaissance — and argued the arm bent back over the shoulder. A straight, defiant arm was added instead. Then in 1906 the real bent arm surfaced in a Roman yard, exactly as he had said, and was finally restored in 1957.

For centuries people have argued whether Laocoön is screaming in agony or holding it in with terrible restraint. The marble will not say — it only holds him there, forever mid-cry, in the Vatican's Museo Pio-Clementino.

If you like this kind of close look at a famous artwork, The Kiss by Rodin is another study in bodies and feeling, or find more walkthroughs on 2 Minutes Art on YouTube.