This 1696 marble sculpture is entitled "Laocoon at ses Fils" or "Laocoon and his Sons". It depicts Laocoon in the center with a son on each of his sides. All three figures are struggling with sea serpents. The right hand of the son on the left is missing.
The artists listed are Jean-Baptiste Tuby, Philibert Vigier & Jean Rousselet.
Wikipedia (
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"Laocoön is a Trojan priest of Poseidon[2] (or Neptune), whose rules he had defied, either by marrying and having sons,[3] or by having committed an impiety by making love with his wife in the presence of a cult image in a sanctuary.[4] His minor role in the Epic Cycle narrating the Trojan War was of warning the Trojans in vain against accepting the Trojan Horse from the Greeks—"A deadly fraud is this," he said, "devised by the Achaean chiefs!"[5]—and for his subsequent divine execution by two serpents sent to Troy across the sea from the island of Tenedos, where the Greeks had temporarily camped.[6]
Laocoön warned his fellow Trojans against the wooden horse presented to the city by the Greeks. In the Aeneid, Virgil gives Laocoön the famous line Equo ne credite, Teucri / Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes, or "Do not trust the Horse, Trojans / Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts." This line is the source of the saying: "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts...
The most detailed description of Laocoön's grisly fate was provided by Quintus Smyrnaeus in Posthomerica, a later, literary version of events following the Iliad. According to Quintus, Laocoön begged the Trojans to set fire to the horse to ensure it was not a trick. Athena, angry with him and the Trojans, shook the ground around Laocoön's feet and painfully blinded him. The Trojans, watching this unfold, assumed Laocoön was punished for The Trojans' mutilating and doubting Sinon, the undercover Greek soldier sent to convince the Trojans to let him and the horse inside their city walls. Thus, the Trojans wheeled the great wooden Horse in. Laocoön did not give up trying to convince the Trojans to burn the horse, and Athena makes him pay even further. She sends two giant serpents to strangle and kill his two sons."
Concerning the asteroid, Wikipedia (
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"3240 Laocoon (1978 VG6) is a Jupiter Trojan discovered on November 7, 1978 by S. J. Bus at Palomar."