-
The Dialogue of Classical and Devotional Cultures in El Greco’s Laocoön of Toledo
- Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies
- UCLA, CMRS Center for Early Global Studies
- Volume 46, 2015
- pp. 171-207
- 10.1353/cjm.2015.0021
- Article
- Additional Information
El Greco’s Laocoön and his Sons (ca. 1610–1614) illustrates a range of highly original pictorial choices that adhere to the Christian humanist thought flourishing in late sixteenth-century Toledo. El Greco painted his Laocoön at approximately the same time as Toledo’s humanist and Jesuit theologian Luis de la Cerda (1558–1643) published his erudite commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid, which dramatizes the Laocoön story and Troy’s destruction for moral emphasis. Whereas Cerda stressed the historical terms of the unity of classical and Christian principles as the core of his ethical construction of priesthood, El Greco instead expressed that a conjunction of classically-derived models, engravings, and sixth-century icon-portraits reaffirmed the Laocoön story in Toledo according to the mysteries of devotional art.