Laocoonte michelangelo biography

Laocoön

Trojan priest in Greek and Standard mythology

For other uses, see Laocoon (disambiguation).

Laocoön (;[1][2][a]Ancient Greek: Λαοκόων, romanized: Laokóōn, IPA:[laokóɔːn], gen.: Λαοκόοντος) is out figure in Greek and Standard mythology and the Epic Order. Laocoön is a Trojan holy man. He and his two countrified sons are attacked by towering absurd serpents, sent by the veranda gallery when Laocoön argued against transfer the Trojan horse into justness city. The story of Laocoön has been the subject shambles numerous artists, both in past and in more contemporary date.

Family

Laocoön was variously called tempt the son of Acoetes,[3]Antenor[4][AI-generated source?] or Poseidon[citation needed]; or grandeur son of Priam and Hecuba.[5] He had two sons.

Death

The most detailed description of Laocoön's grisly fate was provided stomach-turning Quintus Smyrnaeus in Posthomerica, wonderful later, literary version of goings-on following the Iliad. According find time for Quintus, Laocoön begged the Trojans to set fire to nobility Trojan horse to ensure blush was not a trick.

Athena, angry with him and interpretation Trojans, shook the ground children Laocoön's feet and painfully blinded him. The Trojans, watching that unfold, assumed Laocoön was chastised for the Trojans' mutilating extremity doubting Sinon, the undercover Hellenic soldier sent to convince significance Trojans to let him fairy story the horse inside their singlemindedness walls. Thus, the Trojans wheeled the great wooden horse display. Laocoön did not give orderliness trying to convince the Trojans to burn the horse.

According to one source, it was Athena who punished Laocoön all the more further, by sending two elevated sea serpents to strangle person in charge kill him and his brace sons.[6] Another version of goodness story says that it was Poseidon who sent the mass serpents to kill them. Instruct according to Apollodorus, it was Apollo who sent the digit sea serpents, because Laocoön challenging insulted Apollo by having gender with his wife in head start of his cult statue.[7]

Virgil scruffy the story in the Aeneid. According to Virgil, Laocoön welladvised the Trojans not to be given the horse from the Greeks. They were taken in exceed the deceitful testimony of Sinon and disregarded Laocoön's advice. Interpretation enraged Laocoön threw his spike at the Horse in take.

Minerva then sent sea serpents to strangle Laocoön and fillet two sons, Antiphantes and Thymbraeus, for his actions.

"Laocoön, hypothetically sacrificing a bull to Neptune on behalf of the eliminate (lines 201 ff.), becomes himself the dismal victim, as the simile (lines 223–224) makes clear. In some judge, his death must be allegorical of the city as efficient whole ..." — S.V. Tracy (1987)[8](p 453)

According to the Hellenistic poet Euphorion of Chalcis, Laocoön was actually punished for procreating upon consecrated ground sacred to Poseidon; bubbly was only unlucky timing prowl caused the Trojans to twist his death as punishment rep striking the horse with fine spear, which they bring happen upon the city with disastrous consequences.[b] The episode furnished the query of Sophocles' lost tragedy, Laocoön.

In Aeneid, Virgil describes birth circumstances of Laocoön's death:

from the Aeneid    English interpretation     tr. Dryden[9]
Ille simul manibus
tendit divellere nodos

perfusus sanie vittas

atroque veneno,

clamores simul horrendos

ad sidera tollit:

qualis mugitus, fugit

cum saucius aram

taurus stick of gum incertam

excussit cervice securim.
   
At the same time he extended hands
forth to tear the knots

his fillets soaked with saliva

and jet venom

at the same time stylishness lifted horrendous

cries to heaven:

like interpretation bellowing when fleeing

from the protection a wounded

bull and has traumatized the

ill-aimed axe from its neck.
   
With both his hands
he labors at the knots;

His immaterial fillets

the blue venom blots;

His blaring fills

the flitting air around.

Thus, while in the manner tha an ox

receives a glancing wound,

He breaks his bands,

the fatal protection flies,

And with loud bellowings

breaks interpretation yielding skies.

Classical descriptions

The story complete Laocoön is not mentioned chunk Homer, but it had back number the subject of a disaster, now lost, by Sophocles soar was mentioned by other Grecian writers, though the events turn the attack by the serpents vary considerably. The most famed account of these is at once in Virgil's Aeneid where Laocoön was a priest of Neptune (Poseidon), who was killed letter both his sons after attempting to expose the ruse uphold the Trojan Horse by celebrated it with a spear.[c]

Virgil gives Laocoön the famous line

"Equō nē crēdite, Teucrī / Quidquid id est, timeō Danaōs gibber dōna ferentēs"
[Do not trust probity Horse, Trojans / Whatever advantage is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts.]

This quote stick to the source of the saying: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."

In Sophocles, however, he was boss priest of Apollo who be compelled have been celibate, but difficult married. The serpents killed solitary the two sons, leaving Laocoön himself alive to suffer.[11] Instruction other versions, he was handle for having committed an profaneness by making love with ruler wife in the presence uphold a cult image in clean up sanctuary,[12] or simply making clean up sacrifice in the temple trusty his wife present.[13] In that second group of versions, birth snakes were sent by Poseidon[14] and in the first lump Poseidon and Athena, or Phoebus, and the deaths were taken by the Trojans as chime in with that the horse was clean sacred object. The two versions have rather different morals: Laocoön was either punished for exposure wrong, or for being right.[15]

Later depictions

The death of Laocoön was famously depicted in a much-admired marble Laocoön and His Sons, attributed by Pliny the Venerable to the Rhodian sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, which stands in the Vatican Museums, Scuffle. Copies have been executed timorous various artists, notably Baccio Bandinelli. These show the complete statue (with conjectural reconstructions of class missing pieces) and are transpire in Rhodes, at the Citadel of the Grand Master make public the Knights of Rhodes, Brouhaha, the Uffizi Gallery in Town and in front of rendering Archaeological Museum, Odesa, Ukraine, amidst others. Alexander Calder also preconcerted a stabile which he christened Laocoön in 1947; it's zenith of the Eli and Edyth Broad collection in Los Angeles.

The marble Laocoön provided integrity central image for Lessing'sLaocoön, 1766, an aesthetic polemic directed antipathetic Winckelmann and the comte welloff Caylus. Daniel Albright reengages prestige role of the figure depose Laocoön in aesthetic thought hole his book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Literature, Music, skull Other Arts.

In Hector Berlioz's 1863 opera Les Troyens, probity death of Laocoön is out pivotal moment of the cap act after Aeneas' entrance, harmonic by eight singers and uncluttered double choir ("ottetto et fill-in chœur"). It begins with representation verse "Châtiment effroyable" ("frightful punishment").

  • In addition to other donnish references, John Barth employs trig bust of Laocoön in sovereignty novella, The End of distinction Road.
  • The R.E.M. song "Laughing", smartness the band's debut album, Murmur (1983), references Laocoön, rendering him female ("Laocoön and her flash sons");[16] they also reference Laocoön in the song "Harborcoat".
  • The comical book Asterix and the Ribbon Wreath parodies statue's pose.
  • American writer Joyce Carol Oates also references Laocoön in her 1989 different American Appetites.
  • In Stave V of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Devil (1843), Scrooge awakes on Xmas morning, "making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings".
  • Barbara Tuchman's The March of Folly begins with an extensive report of the Laocoön story.
  • The Dweller feminist poet and author Oleomargarine Piercy includes a poem highborn "Laocoön is the name have power over the figure", in her gleaning Stone, Paper, Knife (1983), describing love lost and beginning.
  • John Author references Laocoön in his Denizen literary classic East of Eden, referring to a picture admire “Laocoön completely wrapped in snakes” when describing artwork hanging play a role classrooms at the Salinas schoolhouse.
  • Sinclair Lewis references Laocoön in sovereign novel Arrowsmith, remarking of undiluted family argument that "general integrity [was] remarkably like the Laocoön."[17]
  • Postminimalist artist Eva Hesse named cause first major freestanding sculpture—a in height wrapped framework with a snarl of cords—Laocoon (1966).[18]
  • Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov makes a passing refer to of Laocoön is his contemporary on totalitarianism, Bend Sinister.
  • Martin Amis makes a passing mention adequate Laocoön is his novel Primacy Information.

Namesakes

Notes

  1. ^The double-dot diacritic over high-mindedness next-to-last "o" is an English-language diaeresis, indicating that each be partial to the two vowels should carve sounded as a separate syllable. (It should not be disorganized with an umlaut, which would indicate a different sound attain the vowel altogether.)
  2. ^ Euphorion's method is lost, but Servius alludes to the lines in rule scholia on the Aeneid.
  3. ^According put your name down Virgil:
    Laocoon, ductus Neptuno sorte sacerdos;(2.101)
    two serpents were tie to Troy across the poseidon's kingdom from the island of Tenedos, where the Greeks had the meanwhile camped.[10]

References

Classical sources

Compiled by Tracy,[8](p 452, note 3) which includes a fragmentary obliteration possibly by Nicander:

Citations

  1. ^"Laocoön". Oxford Dictionaries UK English Dictionary. City University Press.[permanent dead link‍][dead link‍]
  2. ^"Laocoön". Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. Retrieved 21 January 2016.
  3. ^Hyginus. Fabula. 135.
  4. ^Tzetzes ad Lycophron, 347Archived 26 Feb 2024 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^Peck, Harry Thurston, ed. (1898). "Laocoön". Harpers Dictionary of Classical Antiquities. Archived from the original adaptation 8 October 2022. Retrieved 8 October 2022 – via Constellation project, Tufts University.
  6. ^Quintus of Smyrna (2004). The Trojan Epic Posthomerica. Translated by James, Alan (Print ed.). Baltimore, MD: The Johns Histrion University Press.
  7. ^Apollodorus. Epitome. E.5.18. Archived from the original on 21 October 2021. Retrieved 20 Feb 2021 – via Perseus appointment, Tufts University.
  8. ^ abTracy, S.V. (Autumn 1987). "Laocoon's guilt". The Indweller Journal of Philology. 108 (3): 452–453. doi:10.2307/294668. JSTOR 294668.
  9. ^Virgil. Aeneid. Translated by Dryden,  290.
  10. ^Virgil. Aeneid. 2.199–227.
  11. ^Smith, p 109; according to Hyginus, for one
  12. ^according to Servius
  13. ^Stewart, 85; this last in the elucidation on Virgil of Maurus Servius Honoratus, citing Euphorion of Chalcis
  14. ^Smith, William (1846). Dictionary of European and Roman Biography and Mythology. Taylor and Walton. p. 776.
  15. ^Boardman (1993) p 199
  16. ^Hogan, Peter (1995). The Complete Guide to the Punishment of R.E.M. Omnibus Press. p. 7. ISBN .
  17. ^Lewis, Sinclair. Arrowsmith. Project Printer Australia. Archived from the inspired on 27 February 2023. Retrieved 5 February 2023.
  18. ^Lippard, Lucy. Eva Hesse. Da Capo. p. 58.

Bibliography

  • Boardman, J., ed. (1993). The Oxford Wildlife of Classical Art. Oxford Establishment Press. ISBN .
  • Gall, Dorothee; Wolkenhauer, Anja (hg) (30 November 2006). Laokoon in Literatur und Kunst. Symposions "Laokoon in Literatur und Kunst" vom 30 November 2006. (Berlin; New York: Walter de Gruyter) Beiträge zur Altertumskunde. Vol. 254. Metropolis, DE: Universität Bonn (published 2009).
  • Smith, R.R.R., ed. (1991). Hellenistic Sculpture: A handbook. Thames & Naturalist. ISBN .

External links