Voltaire,

I think you must have slept -- for which no one I know is going to be much inclined to blame you.

Anyway, here is a general account of the statue: Marble sculptural group that represents an episode recounted in Virgil's Aeneid (II.199--231),in which a sea monster attacks the Trojan priest Laokoon and his two young sons in front of the walls of Troy. The date and provenance of the work (Rome, Vatican, Cortile Belvedere; h. 2.42 m) is disputed. Its identification with the Laokoon by the Rhodian sculptors HAGESANDROS, POLYDOROS AND ATHENODOROS, said by Pliny (Natural History XXXVI.iv.37) to have adorned the Palace of Titus at Rome, has been questioned because Pliny claimed that the latter was made from a single block of marble, while the extant group is made from several. However, stylistic resemblances between the surviving group and the sculptures in the grotto at Sperlonga actually signed by Hagesandros, Polydoros and Athenodoros have caused many scholars to accept it as the Laokoon mentioned by Pliny. They regard it as a work of the 1st century AD in the stylistic tradition of the sculptures of Hellenistic Pergamon, but perhaps also inspired by statues on Rhodes.

I’m not sure how much weight the single v. multiple blocks of marble carries. This piece would almost certainly have been polychrome, and joints between the blocks might have been filled to unify the paint surface. Pliny could have been told or thouught it was a single block with thats actually being the case.

On purely stylistic grounds, this cannot be Phidias. The style is very distinctly Hellenistic, and Phidias is far too early (c.493 - c.430 BC), as opposed to 323 BC – 30.

Lee