Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim (b Kamenz, 22 Jan. 1729; d Brunswick, 15 Feb. 1781). German writer. He was a man of formidable intellect and great versatility who played a leading role in the development of German theatre, but he is known mainly for his treatise on aesthetics, Laokoon (1766). This takes as its starting point a passage in Winckelmann's writings in which he discussed the celebrated antique statue Laocoön. Winckelmann contrasted what he considered the stoical beauty of Laocoön in the sculpture with the loud cries that Virgil causes him to utter in the Aeneid, interpreting the alleged difference (to most people he appears to be howling with pain in the sculpture too) as a superior serenity in Greek art. Lessing dissented, and argued that each art achieves its effects by the means appropriate to its medium and that the artist must exploit the potentialities of his medium to the full, whilst respecting its limitations. Poetry, he held, is most adapted to the representation of action in time but lacks visual vividness. Painting and sculpture are best adapted to the representation of idealized human beauty in repose. Owing to the non-temporal character of the medium they cannot well represent the body in action. Only by selecting the ‘critical’ or ‘fruitful’ moment, which simultaneously preserves physical beauty and concentrates within itself the suggestion of past and future action, can the plastic artist even indirectly represent a sequence of events in action. He thought that the Laocoön group was a masterly example of this, a work whose beauty and significance made it at once a delight to the eye and a stimulus to the imagination. The impact of Lessing's book stemmed from its emphasis on the aesthetic functions of art in contrast with the traditional view of art as the handmaid of religion and philosophy, with a duty primarily to instruct. See also Theophilus.