page_title: Hellenistic art
section_title: Laocoön
hierarchical_section_title: Hellenistic art / Sculpture / "Baroque" / Laocoön
caption_attribution_description: English: Laocoön and his sons, also known as the Laocoön Group. Marble, copy after an Hellenistic original from ca. 200 BC. Found in the Baths of Trajan, 1506. Français&#160;: Laocoon et ses fils, également connu comme le Groupe du Laocoon. Marbre, copie d'un original hellénistique de 200 av. J.-C. environ. Provenance&#160;: thermes de Trajan, en début d'année 1507.Deutsch: Lakoon und seine Söhne, auch als Lakoon-Gruppe bekannt. Marmor, Nachbildung aus hellenistischem Original von 200 v.Chr., gefunden in den Trajan-Thermen in Rom im Jahr 1507.
context_page_description: Hellenistic art is the art of the Hellenistic period generally taken to begin with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and end with the conquest of the Greek world by the Romans, a process well underway by 146 BCE, when the Greek mainland was taken, and essentially ending in 30 BCE with the conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt following the Battle of Actium. A number of the best-known works of Greek sculpture belong to this period, including Laocoön and His Sons, Venus de Milo, and the Winged Victory of Samothrace. It follows the period of Classical Greek art, while the succeeding Greco-Roman art was very largely a continuation of Hellenistic trends.
  The term Hellenistic refers to the expansion of Greek influence and dissemination of its ideas following the death of Alexander – the "Hellenizing" of the world, with Koine Greek as a common language. The term is a modern invention; the Hellenistic World not only included a huge area covering the whole of the Aegean, rather than the Classical Greece focused on the Poleis of Athens and Sparta, but also a huge time range.
context_section_description: Discovered in Rome in 1506 and seen immediately by Michelangelo, beginning its huge influence on Renaissance and Baroque art. Laocoön, strangled by snakes, tries desperately to loosen their grip without affording a glance at his dying sons.  The group is one of very few non-architectural ancient sculptures that can be identified with those mentioned by ancient writers.  It is attributed by Pliny the Elder to the Rhodian sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus.
  Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art, drew inspiration from the Laocoön. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing based many of the ideas in his 'Laocoon' (1766) on Winckelmann's views on harmony and expression in the visual arts.
caption: Laocoön Group, Vatican Museums, Rome.
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