Dr Kathleen Christian discusses the history of the ancient statue ‘the Laocoön group' and its excavation in the Renaissance. Learn more about the work with additional resources.

Winner of the Society of Architectural Historians 2012 Elisabeth Blair MacDougall Award. The award recognizes annually the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of landscape architecture or garden design. This lucid and coherent account provides a new overview of the collecting of antiquities in early renaissance Rome, from the time of Petrarch to the Sack of Rome in 1527. In the early 15th century, when Romans discovered ancient marble sculptures and inscriptions in the ruins, they often melted them into mortar.