Details of laocoon Group Carvings

The third art center in the Hellenistic period was in Rhode Island. In the Hellenistic era, the island was just in the middle between Greece and Asia Minor. At the beginning of the 3rd century BC, it has become an important port and transportation place, and the prosperity of art is self-evident. Wealthy employers often hire many sculptors to make statues for their future luxury buildings. At the beginning of the 3rd century BC, Calles, a disciple of the great sculptor Le Xipas, spent 12 years there, making a bronze colossus of the sun god with a height of 34 meters. According to Pliny's account, there were more than 100 huge statues on the island during the literary boom, from which we can imagine the rich financial resources of Rhode Island. Unfortunately, these giant statues were destroyed in a great earthquake in 227 BC.

Laocoon, marble group portrait, found in Rhode Island, height 184 cm. According to the research of western archaeologists, it was made by the sculptor Aki Sandroos of Rhode Island and his sons Polito Ross and Adinandoros in the middle of BC 1 century. If it is, it should belong to Roman sculpture. However, because the sculpture style of Rhode Island is very similar to that of Belga Ma, both of them focus on the performance of war and fierce struggle, and the characters are very tense and have the same sex in content, such as the Zeus altar sculpture of Belga Ma, which generally takes myth or real war as the theme. Sculpture historians put this group of portraits in the history of Greek sculpture to study.

Laocoon was a Trojan priest in Greek mythology. Under the protection of Athena, the Greek army fought against Troy for 10 years, but the Greeks still could not occupy Troy. Finally, I came up with a Trojan horse plan: I made a huge horse out of wood and put it outside Troy. All the Greek soldiers pretended to retreat and hid in the nearby bay by boat. Odyssey led the heroes to hide in the horse's belly in advance. The Trojans thought that the Greeks had retreated to Greece, so they opened the gate. They saw a huge wooden horse left outside the city gate and thought it was for Athena, the goddess, and wanted to drag it into the city. Laocoon, the old priest of Apollo Temple, warned Troy not to pull Troy into the city for fear of falling into a trap. This angered Athena and the gods to destroy Troy. Athena sent two serpents to kill laocoon and his son (see Homer's Iliad). This is a tragedy of the conflict between man and god. As a priest, it is his duty to predict the coming of disaster, but he violated God's will and was punished. Laocoon's statue shows extreme physical pain. However, this kind of physical pain is more than inner excitement, that is to say, the dramatic performance of the three snake-ridden images exceeds the revelation of their spiritual activities. They lack a kind of passion arising from the struggle of the soul, and their works are not profound and implicit enough, only the superficial strength and structural beauty in modeling.

From the realistic skills of this set of images, we can see that the author is well versed in human anatomy, and has carefully designed and beautifully conceived the movements of people expressing pain and the scenes where giant snakes appear. /kloc-Lessing, a German poet and aesthetician in the 8th century, said in his book laocoon: The pain on laocoon's face is not as strong as the expression people expect according to the intensity of the pain. Just like this, in ancient Greece, beauty was the law of ancient artists. In order to avoid making a fool of themselves when expressing pain, they tend to avoid passion, or play down passion to some extent. Lessing also believes that a sculptor should show the highest beauty under a given physical pain. In the case of physical pain, the violent distortion of the body is incompatible with the highest beauty. So he had to play down the physical pain and turn the wail into a slight sigh. This is not because wailing will show that the mind is not noble, but because wailing will distort the face and make people sick. Laocoon, translated by Zhu Guangqian, People's Literature Publishing House, 1979, p. 16) This analysis has some truth.

Since the18th century, many excellent sculptures in Greece have been discovered in large numbers, so people can have a more comprehensive impression of Greek sculptures and have a deeper understanding of the artistic trends in various periods. It can only be identified by comparison. But when the statue of laocoon was discovered in16th century, the situation was different. At that time, after nearly 1000 years of religious and theological rule, people could only find ancient people's praise for life in art, and even Michelangelo, a great sculptor in the Renaissance, praised his art for being incredible! This is because the development of realistic art cannot explain the significance of art in embodying the inner world of images. Of course, this explanation does not mean that the artistic value of this statue has decreased.

The aesthetic significance of "laocoon" is undeniable, because we have seen the extensive knowledge of ancient sculptors in reflecting human spiritual life: its pyramid-like composition, the rhythmic handling of characters' limbs, and the contrast between the rhythm of snakes and the staggered shapes of arms. In order to show spasmodic muscles, sculptors must carefully observe human movements. Although laocoon does not express more inner language to the audience, it is still a model work that faithfully reproduces nature and is good at processing beauty. This image is now in the Vatican Art Museum in Rome.