Laocoonte del Belvedere -- and beyond -- the Vatican Collection of Ancient Graeco-Roman Statuary ---

Speranza

The Vatican's Pio-Clementino Museum is one of Rome's best collections of ancient Greek and Roman statues

The Laocoön group in the Vatican Museums. 
   
Vatican Museums—Pio-Clementino Museum

Viale Vaticano (on the north side of the Vatican City walls, between where Via Santamaura and the Via Tunisi staircase hit Viale Vaticano; about a 5–10 minute walk around the walls from St. Peter's).

    

This is the best of the Vatican's several ancient Greek and Roman sculpture collections.

In the octagonal Belvedere Courtyard — the original core of the Vatican museums — you'll find the famed Laocoön group, a 1st-century BC tangle of a man and his two children losing a struggle with giant snakes (their fate for warning the Trojans about the Greeks’ tricky wooden horse).


   
Torso del Belvedere.


Nearby is the Apollo Belvedere, an ancient Roman copy of a 4th-century BC Greek original that for centuries continued to define the ideal male body.

As late as the baroque era, a young Bernini was basing his own Apollo in the Borghese Gallery on this one.

In the long Room of the Muses you'll find the muscular Belvedere Torso, a 1st-century BC fragment of another Hercules statue that Renaissance artists like Michelangelo studied to learn how the ancients captured so well the human physique.