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…
Gallery mode Full size at the museum

Laocoön

painter El Greco (Greek, 1541 - 1614)

c. 1610/1614

Medium
oil on canvas
Classification
Painting
Dimensions
overall: 137.5 × 172.5 cm (54 1/8 × 67 15/16 in.) ; framed: 173.99 × 209.55 × 10.16 cm (68 1/2 × 82 1/2 × 4 in.)
Culture
Spanish
Museum
National Gallery of Art, CIS-B
Credit line
Samuel H. Kress Collection
Rights
Public domain (NGA Open Access, CC0), as the museum states it.
Who can see it
Adult profiles and older: its museum's description or title mentions nudity. How works are placed

View at the National Gallery of Art

More by El Greco

See all

More Baroque

See all