Laocoön, or On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry

A small treatise by the German poet, playwright, philosopher, art theorist, and literary critic of the Enlightenment, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, «Laocoön, or On the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry» (1766) became one of the cornerstones of modern European aesthetics. Where are the boundaries of the plastic arts and the art of words, between which classical artistic thought established a system of correspondences, asserting that «painting is silent poetry» and «poetry is speaking painting»? How do different arts work with the categories of space and time, and what role do the concepts of statics and dynamics play in each of them? What is the «fertile moment» in painting and sculpture, and how is it related to the laws of human perception? How do the expressive means of a particular art form, its «technique» and «material» influence the character of the representation? To these and other questions, Lessing's treatise provides unexpected, innovative, sometimes refuting centuries-old aesthetic traditions answers.