Laocoön

mini|hochkant=1.4|The sculpture Laocoön and His Sons, as Lessing described it: depicted without later reconstructed additions and without Laocoön's right arm discovered in 1905 In his essay Laocoön, An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing attempts to work out the fundamental aesthetic differences between the visual arts and literature.

Content

Lessing, in pursuit of his argument, takes as an example an artwork from antiquity, the sculpture Laocoön and his sons, on display in the Vatican Museums. He describes how the artist found the "fruitful instant" (German: "den fruchtbaren Augenblick") in which the entire story of the priest Laocoön and his sons is expressively captured. The observer senses the tension in the unfolding of events, in a moment in which the battle is neither fully won nor yet fully lost: a purely ambivalent instant.

Contradicting both archaeologists and the aesthetic philosopher Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Lessing asserts that the visual arts and poetry (or what we today would call "literature") cannot meaningfully be compared with one another, in contrast to the long-standing tradition, following the quote from Horace, "ut pictura poesis“ („a poem is like a painting“), a tradition continued in the Enlightenment by, among others, Johann Christoph Gottsched, Johann Jakob Bodmer and Johann Jakob Breitinger). Lessing emphasizes that literature arranges words "following one upon the other" (German: "aufeinander folgend"), i.e. temporally, whereas the visual/plastic arts by means of color and shape arranges elements "next to one another" (German: "nebeneinander"). For this reason, "signs arranged next to one another can only depict objects that either themselves, or whose parts, exist next to one another, while signs following one upon the other (i.e. temporally), or whose parts are such, can only depict objects that likewise follow one upon the other." Thus, the visual arts can only depict concrete objects while literature can only depict action.

Painting/sculpture can "mimic action but only allusively by way of physical bodies." Similarly, literature can portray physical bodies "but only allusively by way of action". Since painting only depicts a single moment of action by way of the concrete object, painters are compelled to "choose the most significant (moment), from which what precedes and what follows become the most comprehensible. In the same way, literature in its procession of imitations can use only a single characteristic of the physical body and must therefore choose the one which evokes the most sensual image of the body from that angle which it (literature) needs from it (the body)." (German: „den prägnantesten wählen, aus welchem das Vorhergehende und Folgende am begreiflichsten wird. Ebenso kann auch die Poesie in ihren fortschreitenden Nachahmungen nur eine einzige Eigenschaft der Körper nutzen, und muss daher diejenige wählen, welche das sinnlichste Bild des Körpers von der Seite erwecket, von welcher sie ihn braucht")

Lessing thus counsels the writer not to deliver any exuberant descriptions of an object, person or appearance, but rather to present the description as action (he adds here Homer's exemplary practice of having Agamemnon get dressed rather than describing his clothes and, in place of a comparison of two scepters, telling the stories of both).

Lessing's essay, which can be subsumed within the tradition of the Paragone, exercised a substantial influence on the visual arts and aesthetic theory.

References

• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Laokoon. Oder: Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. Mit beiläufigen Erläuterungen verschiedener Punkte der alten Kunstgeschichte (Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, 271). Reclam, Stuttgart 1994, ISBN 3-15-000271-0.
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Laokoon / Briefe, antiquarischen Inhalts. Text und Kommentar. Hrsg. von Wilfried Barner, Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-618-68022-2.

See also

• Inka Mülder-Bach: Bild und Bewegung. Zur Theorie bildnerischer Illusion in Lessings Laokoon, in: Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 66 (1992), S. 1–30.
• Inge Baxmann, Michael Franz, Wolfgang Schäffner (Hrsg.): Das Laokoon-Paradigma. Zeichenregime im 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin 2000.
• Moniker Schrader: Laokoon – "eine vollkommene Regel der Kunst". Ästhetische Theorien der Heuristik in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Winckelmann, Mendelssohn, Lessing, Herder, Schiller, Goethe. Hildesheim u. a. 2005.
• Michael Franz u. a. (Hrsg.): Electric Laokoon. Zeichen und Medien von der Lochkarte zur Grammatologie. Berlin 2007.
• Dorothee Gall, Anja Wolkenhauer (Hrsg.): Laokoon in Literatur und Kunst. Berlin 2009.
• David Wellbery: Lessing's Laocoon. Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason. Cambridge 1984, S. 116–133.
• Jörg Robert (Hrsg.): Unordentliche Collectanea. Gotthold Ephraim Lessings Laokoon zwischen antiquarischer Gelehrsamkeit und ästhetischer Theoriebildung. Berlin u. a. 2013.
• Dana König: Das Subjekt der Kunst: Schrei, Klage und Darstellung. Eine Studie über Erkenntnis jenseits der Vernunft im Anschluss an Lessing und Hegel. Bielefeld 2011.
• Frederick Burwick (Hrsg.): Lessing's Laokoon: context and reception. Durham, NC 1999.

Links

• Laokoon In: Projekt Gutenberg-DE.
• Laokoon at Zeno.org.
• Laokoon´Text von Bd. 4 der Werkausgabe (Leipzig/ Wien: Bibliographisches Institut, 1911), herausgegeben von Georg Witkowski bei Google Book Search

References

Laocoön/Navigationsleiste Theaterstücke, Gedichte und Schriften von Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Kategorie:Literarisches Werk Kategorie:Literatur (18. Jahrhundert) Kategorie:Literatur (Deutsch) Kategorie:Werk von Gotthold Ephraim Lessing Kategorie:Kunsttheorie

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