Laokoon

Why does Laocoön not scream? The ancient marble group shows the Trojan priest struggling with two serpents. Yet his mouth is only slightly open. Winckelmann saw in this the »edle Einfalt und stille Größe« of the Greeks: a great soul mastering its pain. Lessing disagrees. In Virgil, Laocoön screams – and Homer's heroes, too, scream, weep and curse. The sculptor softens the scream not out of greatness of soul. He softens it because visual art is bound to beauty – and because it can capture only a single moment.

From this observation Lessing develops, in 1766, a theory that resonates to this day. Painting orders its signs in space, poetry in time. The one represents bodies, the other actions. Against the fashion for descriptive poetry and allegorical painting, Lessing draws the boundaries between the arts: sharply, polemically, and with a wealth of examples from Homer to Milton. The effects of this demarcation reach from Herder and Goethe to Clement Greenberg's essay »Towards a Newer Laocoon« (1940) and today's debates on intermediality.

The new edition presents the text in carefully modernised orthography, with Lessing's own notes and a commentary that explains names, works and obsolete words and translates the Greek and Latin quotations.