In his Natural
History, the first century AD writer, Pliny the
Younger, praised the Laocoon as the most beautiful of all artworks in Rome (XXXVI, 37):
…the
Laocoon, which stands in the
palace of the Emperor Titus [is] a work to be preferred to all that
the arts of painting and sculpture have produced.
Pliny attributed the sculpture to three
artists from the island of Rhodes, Athandoruos, Hagesandros, and Polydoros, who
are generally thought to have worked in the first century AD. Modern
scholars largely accept this attribution.
Pliny also said that the sculpture stood in
the palace of the emperor Titus. Since the rediscovery of the sculpture in 1506,
artists have tried to imagine the Laocoon in its original surroundings, as in this painting done by Georges
Chedanne in 1895, which shows the sculpture in Nero's Golden House or
Domus Aurea, rather than in the palace of Titus.
