Chapter 5 advances an interpretation of El Greco's Laocoön as the recasting of the classical myth of Laocoön in favor of a pictorial allegory that resonates with El Greco's creativity and the environment of early modern Toledo. The local reform of the Spanish Church spurred El Greco's imagination to put forward a unique and unprecedented pictorial rendering of the story, one estranged from the Vatican statuary group and associated with his adopted city.

Pictorial Allegory in El Greco's Laocoön

El Greco's painting Laocoön marks a climactic point in his Spanish period, one defined by novelty, complexity, and the destabilization of the paradigms of Classical sculpture (fig. 100). Produced shortly before the artist's death in 1614, El Greco's Laocoön exemplifies the work of his last years in that it illustrates the auxiliary role that sculpture had come to play in his art. For El Greco, sculpture was integral to the synthesis of art and ideas that he believed only painting could manifest. The polychrome sculpture Risen Christ (1595-1598), which El Greco produced for the tabernacle in the main chapel of Toledo's Hospital Tavera, exhibits structural and formal affinities with Michelangelo's Risen Christ, which decorates the main altar of Rome's Santa Maria sopra Minerva. In his mature phase El Greco seems to have adopt Michelangelo's ideas, especially his translation of the ideal and woundless beauty of the Classical nude to the transcendental beauty of Christian art. As his practice became increasingly complex and abstract, El Greco developed the theoretical basis of his ideas, evidence for which emerges in annotations he made to a copy of Giorgio Vasari's Vite de’ piú eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori. El Greco inscribed these annotations in a copy of the second edition of the Lives (published in 1568) that appears to have belonged to Federico Zuccari (1540- 1609). The sentiments of these annotations strongly resemble the anti-Vasarian views of Annibale Carracci (1560-1609): they convey how Early Modern painters were embarking on individualized paths that diverged from the Classical norm, by adapting and recasting the Classical order to accommodate the transcendental capacity of devotional art.