:"agesander" redirects here. for other people named theognis, see agesander (disambiguation).  agesander (also agesandros, hagesander, hagesandros, or hagesanderus; ) was  or, more likely, several greek sculptors from the island of rhodes, working in the first centuries bc and ad, in a late hellenistic "baroque" style.boardman, 199â201 if there was more than one sculptor called agesander they were very likely related to each other. the very important works of the groups of laocoÃ¶n and his sons, in the vatican museums, and the sculptures discovered at sperlonga are both signed by three sculptors including an agesander. ==sculptures== the name agesander is only found in ancient literature in pliny the elder,pliny, natural history xxxvi. 5. s. 4 but occurs in several inscriptions, though between them these certainly refer to a number of different individuals. until the discovery at sperlonga in 1959, only one work which agesander executed was known, although this is one of the most famous of all classical sculptures. pliny records that in conjunction with athenodorus and polydorus, agesander sculpted laocoÃ¶n and his sons, although modern art historians generally view the trio as being either "high-class copyists", or working in a pergamese baroque style created some two centuries earlier.  in 1959 a very large set of sculptures were discovered at sperlonga, and are now in a museum there created for them. one section, the ship's prow of the "scylla group", was signed by the same three names, this time with the names of their fathers, but in a different order. sperlonga is the classical spelunca mentioned by tacitus and others, on the coast between rome and naples, where the emperor tiberius had a celebrated villa. tiberius was nearly killed when the grotto containing the statues collapsed in 26 ad, as tacitus recounts, so they must predate this. the sculptures were in thousands of fragments, and reconstruction of the smaller pieces continues, amid much scholarly argument. the scenes all feature stories of odysseus, and are in a similar style to the laocoÃ¶n, but with many significant differences, not least in quality, being uneven but generally of much lower skill and finish (the group is also considerably larger). both the sperlonga works and the laocoÃ¶n were probably created in italy for very wealthy roman 
1st-century_BC_Greek_people 1st-century_Greek_sculptors Ancient_Rhodian_sculptors Hellenistic_sculptors