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Audio Stop 212

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Close to us, six people, all nude with light skin, stand or lie intertwined with snakes on a bank of rocks in this horizonal painting. Beyond them, the deep, distant landscape has a brown horse, tiny in scale, headed for a city of stone buildings beneath a vivid blue sky filled with twisting white clouds. The people’s bodies are sinewy and elongated, and their skin is painted in tones of ivory white, warmed with peach highlights and streaked with deep gray shadows. At the center, a man with a white beard and white, curly hair lies back on the charcoal-gray rock with his knees bent and his shins splayed out. With his body angled away from us to our right, he holds the body of a long, silvery-gray snake in his left fist, on our right, down by his hip. The snake curves behind the man’s body and he grips the snake behind its head. The man has high cheekbones and sunken cheeks, and rolls his eyes up and back to look at the snake, whose wide-open mouth nearly touches his hair. To our left, a cleanshaven young man stands with his body facing us but he arches back, holding an arcing snake in his hands. The young man’s right hand, on our left, bends at the elbow so he can grasp the snake’s tail and his other arm stretches straight back, holding the snake’s body as it curls around so its fangs nearly reach the young man’s side. To our right, next to the older man, a second, dark-haired young man lies on the rocks with his head toward us. His feet are on the ground, so we look onto the tops of his thighs. He lies with one hand resting on the ground, overhead. Three people seem to float, feet dangling, alongside the right edge of the painting. The person closest to us looks onto the writhing people in profile, back to us. A second person just beyond also looks to our left. A third head turns the opposite direction and looks off to our right. In the distance, the golden-brown horse is angled away from us, one front leg raised, on a path that moves from behind the rocky outcropping to the far-off town. Nestled in a shallow valley, buildings in the town are mostly painted with rose pink and red walls and smoke-gray roofs. The land dips to a deeper, green valley to our right, lining the horizon that comes two-thirds of the way up the composition. The standing people are outlined against the sapphire-blue sky and knotted, gray and white clouds.

El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos)

Laocoön, c. 1610/1614

West Building, Main Floor — Gallery 28

Celebrated poet Teri Cross Davis and curator of Italian and Spanish paintings Gretchen Hirschauer discuss the humanity and emotions revealed in El Greco’s depiction of the legend of Laocoön.

Read full audio transcript

NARRATOR:
The artist El Greco made this painting in Spain, around 1614. It depicts the death of Laocoön, the bearded man in the center, during the war fought by the ancient Greeks against the Trojans.

GRETCHEN HIRSCHAUER:
Laocoön was a Trojan priest and he got in trouble when he threw a spear at the Trojan Horse, which you see very small, in the background.

I'm Gretchen Hirschauer.  I am a curator in the Department of Italian and Spanish Paintings.

NARRATOR:
The Roman writer Virgil told how the Greeks hid an elite military unit inside the giant wooden horse left outside the walls of Troy. The Greeks then pretended to sail away in defeat. The Trojans triumphantly pulled the horse inside the city walls, and, under cover of darkness, the Greek soldiers crept out and opened the gates of Troy to their comrades.

According to Virgil, Laocoön had tried in vain to warn his fellow Trojans about the horse, even throwing a spear at its wooden sides. And in doing so, he brought down the fury of the goddess Athena, protector of the Greeks, upon himself and his sons.

GRETCHEN HIRSCHAUER:
And so she, in retaliation, condemned the whole family - the father and the two sons - to death, and they were killed by serpents.  

To me when I look at this picture, the first thing I see is the face of Laocoön.  And the sort of agony on his face, the anguish.  He knows what's about to happen not only to him, but happening to his sons as well.

TERI CROSS DAVIS:
And in that moment I feel so much for him, as a father. He knows he's lost, because of his desire to do the right thing.   

My name is Teri Ellen Cross Davis. I am a poet, I am also the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series artistic curator and poetry programs manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library.  

There's a way into any art. For me, that door is opened by our own human experiences. I can look at this and say: I know that father’s grief, I know his pain, I know his anguish. I'm a Black woman in America - I worry about my children’s safety every day. What makes a poem work for me is the humanity that it exposes; what makes this painting work for me is the humanity it exposes.  

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