During Winckelmann’s time in Rome another sculpture came to rival
—or even to surpass—the Laocoön in his esteem; indeed, he frequently
mentions the Apollo Belvedere  alongside the Laocoön as contrasting
but equally compelling examples of beauty. While the Laocoön has
retained its high reputation, the Apollo has fallen from favour. In The
Nude (1956), one of the most widely read books on art of the twentieth
century, the art historian Kenneth Clark (1903–83) confessed himself
mystified that so learned a connoisseur as Winckelmann could admire
the Apollo, which for Clark displayed ‘weak structure and slack surfaces
which, to the aesthetic of pure sensibility, annul its other qualities’; in
no other famous work, Clark thought, ‘are idea and execution more
distressingly divorced’.

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