Rome. The statue of Laocoon was found during excavations in a vineyard on the Oppian Hill, owned by Felice de Fredis, near Nero’s Domus Aurea. The excavation, of astonishing magnitude according to contemporary accounts, was personally witnessed, among others, by the sculptor Michelangelo and the architect Giuliano da Sangallo. The latter had been sent by the Pope to assess the find. It was Giuliano da Sangallo himself who identified the still partially buried fragments as the sculpture cited by Pliny. The sculptural group of Laocoon and His Sons is a marble sculpture (height 242 cm) by the sculptors Agesander, Athanodorus, and Polydorus, dating to the 1st century AD and housed in the Pio-Clementino Museum of the Vatican Museums in Vatican City. It depicts the famous episode narrated in the Aeneid in which the Trojan priest Laocoon and his sons are attacked by sea serpents. The statue is a Roman copy of a Greek marble original. The statue was placed in the Vatican Museums that same year by order of Pope Julius II, and they were inaugurated with it. However, they were not opened to the public until 1771.
