Athanadoros, Hagesandros, and Polydoros of Rhodes, Laocoön and his Sons, early first century C.E., marble, 7'10 1/2" high (Vatican Museums) Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker & Dr. Beth Harris. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Incredible this was produced _thousands_ of years ago and that the skills were lost for so many hundreds of years. Scares me how backwards it’s possible to go….
We cant even imagine the splendors of ancient roman city. How many masterpieces in Art, sculpute and painting are lost? We will never know! what we see today is only a fraction of what was actually there!
***** Long after Romans conquered Greece and many greek scholars and artists migrated to Rome , then it became a speldid city.You see, Roman wealth and power combined with Greek sciences ,art and philosophy created one of the most extraordinary empires in history.
What was not mentioned is that this sculpture piece inspired Michelangelo into sculpting. The right arm was found hundreds of years later in Italy. Many famous sculptors copied this piece. I myself a student back in 1970 at UofC, in Calgary made a one third in size copy of it and still have it today.
We can observe the precision of the sculpture's proportions, the unsurpassed rotational inclination of the bodies, as well as the tragedy expressions of the complex, which overflows with an indefinable eroticism. Magnificent Greek Art.
The final thoughts are very true to me. I was immediately taken by how beautiful and powerful an image this was, but also by how terrible the subject matter is. Interesting that it's in the Vatican, too..
The detail on his body is incredible, including a large vein on the shoulder and abdominal striations. Someone must have modeled for this you'd imagine
Has anyone ever thought that there's no specie of snakes, that both strangles ánd bites? Both strangling and biting are the two main ways of snakes to kill their prey, though the two acts are never performed by one snake, since they, at most, have one of these capabillities
I'm not convinced its useful to hold ancient myth to the standards of modern science, after all, you'd also have to deal with that pesky part of the story that has an Olympian god sending in the serpents as punishment. Still, its worth noting that the word herpetology has a Greek root.
You can't be too picky with Agesander. Even if they invented some muscles in their creations, that doesn't take much away from their knowledge of gesture and art in general.
Although your comment is undoubtedly true when ever I’ve watch people handling pythons they always say that they have nasty bites as the pythons teeth curve backwards & make it extremely difficult to get them off. Also when pythons hunt they tend to be ambush predators & wait for an appropriate meal to come close enough for them to strike, ie. the bite, followed very quickly by the enfolding & wrapping around by their body together into strangle mode.
"Equō nē crēdite, Teucrī / Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs et dōna ferentēs" Also the poor Cassandra saw the same, that the Trojans was about to be fooled by Odyssevs horse
