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Updated: May 9, 2025
We all remember the group of the Laocoon that Titian sketched with apes, and those whole humorous poems in lines found in Herculaneum, where Anchises and Æneas are represented with the heads of apes and pigs.
The pride of the world in sculptures seem to be the Laocoon and the Dying Gladiator, in Rome. They are as old as Pompeii, were dug from the earth like Pompeii; but their exact age or who made them can only be conjectured. But worn, and cracked, without a history, and with the blemishing stains of numberless centuries upon them, they still mutely mock at all efforts to rival their perfections.
Among them are antique copies of the Cupid and the Faun of Praxiteles, the statue of Demosthenes, the Minerva Medica, the Athlete of Lysippus, the Torso Belvedere sculptured by Apollonius, the Belvidere Antinous, of faultless anatomy and a study for Domenichino, the Laocoön, so panegyrized by Pliny, the Apollo Belvedere, the work of Agasias of Ephesus, the Sleeping Ariadne, with numerous other statues of gods and goddesses, emperors, philosophers, poets, and statesmen of antiquity.
The chief curiosity, if not the chief ornament of a very elegant library, filled with vases and bronzes, is a marble head, supposed to be the original head of the Laocoon. It is, unquestionably a finer head than that which at present figures upon the shoulders of the famous statue.
Lessing, presumably in his Laocoon, has attributed this to the effects of sheer panic; but Carver's explanation, which attributes the ochre-like tint to the hypodermic operation of the Mash-Glance, seems far more plausible. For myself I abstain from casting the weight of my support in either scale, because my particular province is speculative philosophy and not comparative dermatology.
We necessarily visited the Forum, where Caesar was assassinated, and also the Tarpeian Rock. We saw the Dying Gladiator at the Capitol, and I think that even we appreciated that wonder of art; as much, perhaps, as we did that fearful story wrought in marble, in the Vatican the Laocoon. And then the Coliseum.
His hands were busy with his garments all this time; turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance. "I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings.
The serpents advanced directly to the spot where Laocoon stood with his two sons. They first attacked the children, winding round their bodies and breathing their pestilential breath in their faces. The father, attempting to rescue them, is next seized and involved in the serpents' coils.
It belonged to the Netherlands, and has been returned to them. It was said that the emperor Alexander offered fifteen thousand pounds for it. "The removal of the statues was later in commencing, and took up more time; they were still packing these up when I quitted Paris. I saw the Venus, the Apollo, and the Laocoön removed: these may be deemed the presiding deities of the collection.
This remark is the more worthy of attention, as it does not apply to any of the figures of the Grecian masters whom I have mentioned. The figure by Phidias on Monte Cavallo at Rome, the Apollo, the Laocoon, the Venus, the Hercules, and the fighting gladiator, are all perfect on the just principles I have mentioned.
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