In the context of Laocoön and His Sons, analyze the Laocoön as an ideal of art of the Influence.
Pliny's description of Laocoön as "a work to be preferred to all that the arts of painting and sculpture have produced" has led to a tradition which debates this claim that the sculpture is the greatest of all artworks. Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) wrote about the paradox of admiring beauty while seeing a scene of death and failure.  The most influential contribution to the debate, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's essay Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, examines the differences between visual and literary art by comparing the sculpture with Virgil's verse. He argues that the artists could not realistically depict the physical suffering of the victims, as this would be too painful. Instead, they had to express suffering while retaining beauty.Johann Goethe said the following in his essay, Upon the Laocoon "A true work of art, like a work of nature, never ceases to open boundlessly before the mind. We examine, – we are impressed with it, – it produces its effect; but it can never be all comprehended, still less can its essence, its value, be expressed in words.The most unusual intervention in the debate, William Blake's annotated print Laocoön, surrounds the image with graffiti-like commentary in several languages, written in multiple directions. Blake presents the sculpture as a mediocre copy of a lost Israelite original, describing it as "Jehovah & his two Sons Satan & Adam as they were copied from the Cherubim Of Solomons Temple by three Rhodians & applied to Natural Fact or History of Ilium". This reflects Blake's theory that the imitation of ancient Greek and Roman art was destructive to the creative imagination, and that Classical sculpture represented a banal naturalism in contrast to Judeo-Christian spiritual art.
The central figure of Laocoön served as loose inspiration for the Indian in Horatio Greenough's The Rescue (1837–1850), which stood before the east façade of the United States Capitol for over 100 years.Near the end of Charles Dickens' 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge self-describes "making a perfect Laocoön of himself with his stockings" in his hurry to dress on Christmas morning.
John Ruskin disliked the sculpture and compared its "disgusting convulsions" unfavourably with work by Michelangelo, whose fresco of The Brazen Serpent, on a corner pendentive of the Sistine Chapel, also involves figures struggling with snakes – the fiery serpents of the Book of Numbers. He invited contrast between the "meagre lines and contemptible tortures of the Laocoon" and the "awfulness and quietness" of Michelangelo, saying "the slaughter of the Dardan priest" was "entirely wanting" in sublimity. Furthermore, he attacked the composition on naturalistic grounds, contrasting the carefully studied human anatomy of the restored figures with the unconvincing portrayal of the snakes:
For whatever knowledge of the human frame there may be in the Laocoön, there is certainly none of the habits of serpents. The fixing of the snake's head in the side of the principal figure is as false to nature, as it is poor in composition of line. A large serpent never wants to bite, it wants to hold, it seizes therefore always where it can hold best, by the extremities, or throat, it seizes once and forever, and that before it coils, following up the seizure with the twist of its body round the victim, as invisibly swift as the twist of a whip lash round any hard object it may strike, and then it holds fast, never moving the jaws or the body, if its prey has any power of struggling left, it throws round another coil, without quitting the hold with the jaws; if Laocoön had had to do with real serpents, instead of pieces of tape with heads to them, he would have been held still, and not allowed to throw his arms or legs about.
In 1910 the critic Irving Babbitt used the title The New Laokoon: An Essay on the Confusion of the Arts for an essay on contemporary culture at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1940 Clement Greenberg adapted the concept for his own essay entitled Towards a Newer Laocoön in which he argued that abstract art now provided an ideal for artists to measure their work against. A 2007 exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in turn copied this title while exhibiting work by modern artists influenced by the sculpture.
Sistine Chapel Clement Greenberg fiery serpents Roman art sublimity Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Johann Goethe Virgil John Ruskin Laocoön Charles Dickens Henry Moore Institute The Rescue Indian Irving Babbitt A Christmas Carol Johann Joachim Winckelmann Book of Numbers Michelangelo Dardan Horatio Greenough left United States Capitol William Blake