St. Joseph University Laocoon Restoration

In 2019, I began restoring a plaster copy of the Laocoon sculpture group for St. Joseph University. The figure of Antiphantes was pulled off the sculpture group by an angry student. The cast was one of many plaster casts loaned out by the Metropolitian Museum of Art. Unfortunately half of the parts of the broken figure were thrown away.   

The Laocoon plaster cast has been known to me since my first days as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where we had an identical plaster copy. Unfortuantely covid came to be, and I was unable to take molds off the PAFA cast. So I went to work reconstructing the figure with reference materials.     

I first began making a mold of the footprint on the base of the group where Antiphantes locked in. This would prevent my reconstruction from misalignment when reinstalling the figure. The goal was to reuse as many parts that I had left available to me. This cast like that of the PAFA Cast was a plaster "copy" of the marble Laocoon at the Vatican, not a direct plaster cast taken from a mold off the marble group. 

I reassembled the lower body section with the supportive drapery. Then attached what was left of the upper body. Since I only had a small part of the face, I sculpted the rest with plasticine and made a mold off the finished head and cast it into plaster and attached it onto the body. The shoulder and snake had to be reattached, the fingers of the hand and toes were reconstucted like the head. Antphantes was reinstalled at St. Joseph University in 2022 in a newly remodeled gallery on campus.