Laocoon and His Sons

In Greek legend the Trojan priest Laocoon warned his city against the Greeks' wooden horse and was punished by the gods: two sea serpents coil around him and his sons, crushing and biting as he wrenches backward in agony. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder ranked the group, carved by three sculptors from the island of Rhodes, above all other works of art. When it was dug from a vineyard in Rome in 1506, Michelangelo rushed to see it, and its straining, muscular anguish reshaped the High Renaissance and, later, the Baroque. Scholars still dispute whether it is a Hellenistic Greek original or a Roman copy.