Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry

Why the marble Laocoön only sighs while Virgil's priest screams: the essay that split painting from poetry.

by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing259 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie
First published: 1766(aged 37)
Original language: German

Overview

Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the historian of ancient art, wrote in 1755 that the marble Laocoön — a Trojan priest and his sons crushed by serpents — does not scream as Virgil's Laocoön screams in the Aeneid, and he read the sculptor's restraint as the sign of a great Greek soul. Lessing thought the explanation wrong and the comparison unfair to the poet. The sculptor softened the cry, he argued, because a gaping mouth is ugly in stone and would stay fixed there for good; the poet can let his priest scream because a scream in verse passes with the line. From that case Lessing drew the book's claim: painting and sculpture set bodies side by side in space and must choose a single moment, while poetry follows actions through time, and each art goes wrong when it takes on the other's task. Homer does not describe the shield of Achilles; he shows it being made. Lessing wrote much of it in Breslau, where he worked from 1760 to 1765 as secretary to the Prussian general Tauentzien, and he knew the statue only from engravings. His preface calls the sections disorderly notes toward a book rather than a book, and with three sections still to go he stops to report that Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art has just appeared and that he will go no further without reading it. The first part came out in Berlin at Easter 1766, and Lessing never published the further parts he had planned. It was widely read and mostly agreed with, and came to count as the most consequential German writing on aesthetics of its century.

Key concepts

What is the "most fruitful moment" in a painting or statue?

The single instant an artist should choose because it leaves the viewer's imagination the most room. Lessing argues that this is never the peak of a passion: once the extreme is shown, the imagination cannot go higher and can only fall back to weaker images. A moment short of it lets the viewer complete the cry or the blow in the mind.

What does Lessing mean by "charm is beauty in motion"?

That a poet can rival the painter's beauty by showing it move. A poem cannot make a reader see a face by listing its features, one after another. It can show a smile, a glance, a gesture passing in time, and charm of that kind comes more easily to the poet than to the painter, who can only hint at movement in a fixed image.

Why was beauty the highest law of ancient visual art?

Because, Lessing argues, the Greek artist set out to imitate beautiful bodies and avoided whatever would distort them, including violent expressions of pain or rage. Expression was softened until it could live alongside beauty. That is why Laocoön's cry becomes a sigh in marble, while the poets, who were not bound by the same law, let their heroes scream.

Why can poetry use ugliness that painting must avoid?

Because in a poem an ugly feature is mentioned and then passes, while in a picture it stays in view all at once and for good. Words describe a body piece by piece in time, so ugliness loses much of its offence. The painter shows it whole and fixed. Lessing allows the poet even disgust in measured doses, which no painter could afford.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Bodies in Space, Actions in Time

Can a poem do what a painting does, or a painting what a poem does? The book draws a border between them and shows what each art loses by crossing it.

Painting and sculpture set figures and colours side by side in space, so their proper subject is bodies, and they must choose a single moment, the one that leaves the imagination most free. Poetry uses sounds that follow one another in time, so its proper subject is actions. Each art goes wrong when it takes on the other's task. Homer does not describe the shield of Achilles but shows it being made, and he conveys Helen's beauty through its effect, turning beauty into charm, which is beauty in motion.

poetry
painting
poetry and painting
poetry and visual art
representation
artistic representation
visual representation
description
narrative
temporality
imagination
language
art theory
visual arts

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Why the Marble Does Not Scream

Why does the sculpted Laocoön only sigh when Virgil's priest screams? Lessing's answer replaces a story about the Greek soul with a law of the arts.

Winckelmann had read the statue's restraint as the mark of a great Greek soul. Lessing points out that Greek poets let their heroes cry out, Sophocles' wounded Philoctetes among them, so the restraint cannot be a national ethic. For the ancients, he argues, beauty was the highest law of the visual arts, and a gaping mouth is ugly in stone, where it would stay forever. A scream in verse passes with the line. Ugliness and even disgust remain open to the poet in ways closed to the painter.

aesthetics
beauty
ugliness
disgust
sculpture
expression
emotion
compassion
imitation
art history
art criticism
historical evidence
textual interpretation
interpretation
literary criticism
theater

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Within this work

passages held: 259
distinct concepts: 243
by passages held, corpus-wide: #286

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “aesthetics” and “poetry”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 21 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
aesthetics	poetry	45
painting	poetry	33
aesthetics	beauty	32
aesthetics	painting	32
poetry	representation	23
aesthetics	representation	22
painting	representation	17
aesthetics	artistic representation	14
artistic representation	beauty	7
artistic representation	poetry	7
beauty	poetry	7
beauty	poetry and painting	7
aesthetics	poetry and painting	6
beauty	painting	6
beauty	representation	4
art history	poetry and painting	3
artistic representation	painting	3
aesthetics	art history	2
art history	painting	1
art history	poetry	1
artistic representation	poetry and painting	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1755 Pope ein Metaphysiker!
Written jointly with Moses Mendelssohn early in their friendship, this pamphlet first drew the line between poet and philosopher that Laocoön would later redraw between poet and painter.
DE
1757 Briefwechsel über das Trauerspiel
The workshop of Lessing's dramatic theory: here, against Mendelssohn and Nicolai, he first tested the account of pity that he later rebuilt for the Hamburg Dramaturgy.
DE
1766 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Laokoon oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie) you are here DE
1767 Hamburg Dramaturgy (Hamburgische Dramaturgie)
A periodical before it was a book, written week by week for a theatre that did not last, this became Lessing's principal work on the theory of drama.
DE
1777 Kleine Schriften zum Fragmentenstreit
Short pamphlets from 1777 and 1778, written as the fragments controversy moved from courteous replies to Schumann toward the open feud with Goeze.
DE
1778 A Rejoinder (Eine Duplik)
A reply to a single defender of the Easter accounts, written in the winter of 1777–78, just before the quarrel with Goeze crowded out every other exchange.
DE
1778 Anti-Goeze
The centre of the fragments controversy; after the duke's ban the same argument moved into Nathan the Wise.
DE
1778 Axioms (Axiomata, wenn es deren in dergleichen Dingen giebt)
Argued point by point rather than fought, this answer to Goeze sets out in compact form the distinction between the Bible and religion that the Anti-Goeze letters defend with ridicule.
DE
1778 Ernst and Falk: Dialogues for Freemasons (Ernst und Falk. Gespräche für Freimäurer)
Dialogue rather than treatise, and written for Freemasons rather than about them, this is where Lessing carried the tolerance argument of his theological quarrels into a theory of civil society.
DE
1780 The Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts)
Its hundred numbered paragraphs, begun inside the fragments controversy and finished after it, turn the quarrel over scripture into a single picture of religious history.
DE
1784 Gotthold Ephraim Leßings theologischer Nachlaß (Theologischer Nachlass)
An editorial title for papers Lessing kept to himself: two of them come from his early twenties in Berlin, decades before the fragments controversy made his religious views public.
DE
1795 Philosophischer Nachlass
Working notes on metaphysics that Lessing kept to himself, from his Breslau years onward; at least one reached print only after Jacobi's report had made his Spinozism a public question.
DE

— or open another of their works