Rare Monumental Laocoön Bronze Poised for $4 Million Sale
A life-size bronze cast of the classical group “Laocoön and his Sons,” one of only four known full-size period bronzes, is set to be auctioned in London as a prelude to Sotheby’s Old Masters evening sale on July 1, with an estimate of £2 million to £3 million ($2.6 million to $3.9 million). Artnet recounts the sculpture’s lineage from the famed marble discovered in Rome in 1506, which Michelangelo inspected for Pope Julius II and linked to Pliny the Elder’s description, calling it “a singular miracle of art.” After Napoleon took the original to Paris under the Treaty of Tolentino (1797), a plaster mold was made at the Musée Napoleon (now the Louvre) and used for a bronze cast completed in 1817 by Auguste-Jean Marie Carbonneaux, commissioned by British collector George Watson-Taylor for £2,000 (about $200,000 today). The article notes Carbonneaux’s technical innovation using sand molds to enable complex large-scale bronzes and identifies other surviving casts, including examples at the French Parliament and at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, England.
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This story was covered in Lost Masterpieces and a Market’s Identity Crisis