Laocoon,

17th century

The ancient marble sculpture of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons strangled by snakes (2.42 meters high) was excavated in Rome in 1506. Pope Julius II acquired and exhibited it in the Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican Palace, where it still stands today. One of the very few documented ancient sculptures, it was praised by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History and said to be by three sculptors from the island of Rhodes. Arguably the most celebrated and influential ancient work from its discovery through the later eighteenth century, the Laocoön was copied countless times in drawings, paintings, full-scale casts in plaster or bronze, and small-scale reductions like this.