My Laocoon - Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks (California Studies in the History of Art Discovery Series) (Volume 8)

University of California Press; First Edition (April 3, 2000). Good secondhand condition.

Analyzing the theme, provenance, and history of the Vatican Laocoön, Richard Brilliant traces the interpretation of this masterpiece of Greco-Roman sculpture through the ages, showing how these interpretations have shaped its reception. The Vatican Laocoön has suffered the vicissitudes of changing tastes, differing agendas of incompatible interpretations, and relegation to the margins of aesthetic preference. Several Laocoöns are identified in this erudite and strikingly original study: the alleged, lost Greek original the extant marbles sculpted in the first century; the sixteenth-century restoration and its impact; the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topos of critical judgment; the twentieth-century re-restored artifact of ancient art. Yet, the Vatican Laocoön contains all of them in its obdurate self, and My Laocoön treats their history as a means of demonstrating an artwork's power to transcend its critical reception.