Suspecting trickery, Laocoön, a mythical priest of Troy, had warned his countrymen not to accept the wooden horse left outside the city by the Greeks and had hurled his spear at it to prove that it was hollow. He thus incurred the wrath of the gods for desecrating an object dedicated to the goddess Athena. El Greco depicted serpents, sent by the angry gods, engaging Laocoön and one son in a mortal struggle, while a second son lies dead at his father’s side. The identity of the unfinished figures on the right is unclear. Using writhing line, lurid color, and illogically conceived space, the artist projected an unrelieved sense of doom.
NARRATOR:
Curator David Brown.
DAVID BROWN:
“As an artist, El Greco has a particular appeal for the twentieth century, I think. And it’s not surprising that many of his finest works are in America, in the National Gallery in particular. He had a way of portraying religious subjects with great energy and passion and spirituality, which makes them, resonate with a modern audience. This painting of the Laocoön is one of those extremely rare examples where the artist treated a pagan subject.
NARRATOR:
In Greek mythology, Laocoön was a priest who warned his fellow Trojans not to accept the gift of a wooden horse left behind by the invading Greeks. But his famous words—“Trust not the Greeks, even when bearing gifts”—were ignored, and in despair Laocoön hurled his spear against the horse. You can see the animal in this painting in the distance, to the left of center – facing the 17th-century Spanish city of Toledo, which the artist El Greco uses to represent Troy.
Laocoön’s gesture angered the goddess of wisdom, Minerva, to whom the horse had been dedicated. And in revenge, the gods ordered serpents to kill the priest and his sons. Here, we witness their grisly end, which the Trojans considered a signal to take the wooden horse inside the city walls. By night Greek soldiers crept from the animal’s belly and overwhelmed Troy, bringing an end to the Trojan War.
DAVID BROWN:
“The great classical treatment of this subject is the statue in the Vatican, and El Greco undoubtedly knew that work, but in his own interpretation it wasn’t the heroic muscularity of the statue group which inspired him. He took this pagan subject and treated the figures as if they were Christian martyrs. They are broken up into these wraithlike shapes, the manner in which El Greco represented his saintly figures. They’re shown against a darkening sky. The picture is full of the deep and almost incandescent spirituality of El Greco, even though it represents a pagan subject.”
NARRATOR:
Scholars still debate the meaning of these unfinished figures. They may be Adam and Eve, or perhaps Paris and the beautiful Helen, wife of the king of Troy. Paris abducted her, beginning the Trojan War.
Or perhaps the figures are gods overseeing the terrible punishment -- the male may represent the Greek sun god, Apollo, angered when Laocoön, who was in the god’s service, broke his priestly vows of chastity. In that case, the devout El Greco may have intended this picture as a warning very much in keeping with the strict teachings of the Catholic Church in the early 1600s.
Although the figures have been variously identified, and the meaning of the painting remains elusive, what is clear is that El Greco has used color and form and composition in an extraordinarily expressive way.
