The Laocoon Group

The Laocoon group – a dramatic battle between humans and snakes. The Roman writer Pliny named this the world's best work of art! He also claims that the artists behind the Laocoon Group came from Rhodes and were named Hagesander, Polydororos and Athenodoros. Pliny had seen the sculpture in the palace of Emperor Titus in the 70s AD. Ancient Romans loved Greek art, which was a status object in the homes of the rich

The story of Laocoon is found in Virgil's Aeneid, written about 20 BC. Here it is depicted how the Greek army unexpectedly leaves the besieged Troy, but remains outside the city wall a gigantic wooden horse. The priest Laokoon warns that there is something fishy about this unexpected gift. The goddess Athena, who of course sided with the Greeks, sends two sea serpents to kill him and his sons. The blinded Trojans still drag the wooden horse into the city. But as night falls, a Greek army pours out of its belly to kill and enslave everyone in Troy. Laocoon's cruel fate was only the beginning of a new chapter in the brutal history of war.

The term Trojan horse still lives on as a negative symbol. We find it in Karl Gerhard's show about traitors during the Second World War, and today Trojan horse - also called Trojan - is the name of a kind of computer virus.

The sculpture was found in Rome in 1506 and the motif is immediately identified by people who read Pliny. Pope Julius II buys it to place in the Vatican where it can still be seen.

Among the first to see and admire the sculpture in the 1500th century were artists such as Michelangelo. The Laocoon group also influenced High Renaissance art in a dramatic direction. But the sculpture above all has a universal human content: contorted bodies in pain and struggle show man's helplessness when the gods - and the war - strike.

The Art Academy's Laokoon came to Sweden in 1698 and belongs to the plaster casts ordered by the castle architect Nicodemus Tessin. All the movements and details that make up the sculpture make it extremely complicated to cast. Plaster casts as old as this are actually rare.

The seams visible on Laokoon's body show the joints between different piece shapes. It's the many smaller molds that needed to be taken from different parts of the sculpture, to really get all the details, and then be able to assemble the parts into a correct whole. In the 1600th century, these joints were a mark of quality that showed that the caster had worked hard to get as close to the original as possible.