Leo X commissioned Florentine Baccio Bandinelli in 1520 to make this full-size marble copy of the famous Laocoon group as a gift to François I. It was not finished until the reign of Clement VII, who could not bear to part with it, sent some antiquities to the King of France in its stead, and in 1525 sent Baccio’s Laocoon to Florence, where it was put into the courtyard of the Palazzo Medici on Via Larga. It is now at the Uffizi.
François eventually did get his copy later, in the 1540s, when Francesco Primaticcio made a bronze cast of the group.
