  Winckelmann illustrates the last claim with a discussion of the famous statue of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his sons being strangled by the serpents Neptune sent to stifle his warnings against accepting the “gift” of the Trojan horse. The version of this statue that was unearthed near Naples in 1506 and quickly acquired by Pope Julius II for the Vatican, where it has been displayed ever since, is now thought to be a Roman copy of a Pergamese bronze from the second century BCE, and may or may not be the same one described by Pliny (Natural History, XXXV). Winckelmann took it to be a classical Greek work. He also must have known it only from illustration when he first wrote about it in “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks,” since he moved to Rome only after that essay was published. Be that as it may, Winckelmann writes: