Jack Semancik’s Reviews > Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry > Status Update

Chapter 23 considers ugliness in poetry, and chapter 24 ugliness in the visual arts. Lessing seems to look at ugliness in poetry as more of a metaphor, whereas he considers it more of a waste in painting/sculpting (despite the fact that he asserts that accurate representation produces pleasure in the viewer).

Chapters 20 and 21 indulge Lessing to compare various “perfect” and “imperfect” poems from various time periods, especially compared to Homer. Lessing suggests that poetry is better able to capture charm, rather than the specific aspects of beauty; in Lessing’s estimation, descriptions of beauty are less impactful than how a beautiful person might carry themselves (at least as far as poetry is concerned).

In Chapter 17, Lessing defends his prior notions against hypothetical objections, which he continues in Chapter 18. Chapter 18 includes an interesting portion on the difficulty of translating Homer’s use of adjectives into various languages (the Homeric form of Greek allows for multiple adjectives to agglutinate, whereas most modern languages do not). Chapter 19 covers visual perspective in painting and poetry.

Lessing, across a number of exceedingly short chapters, asserts the poet’s skill in depicting actions (consecutive moments) and the painter’s skill in depicting bodies (unitary moments). Later, Lessing underlines the poetic charm of calculated description, rather than using poetry to exactly describe a situation (as though it were a substitute for visual art), upholding Homer as the premier example.

Chapters 11 covers the supposed dichotomy between the development of ideas and the execution of those ideas in the media of painting/sculpting and poetry. Chapter 12 covers the use of metaphor in poetry, and its translation (or mistranslation) into the visual arts.

Chapter 6 finds Lessing defending his belief that Virgil could not have copied the Laocoön statue group in his description of Laocoön. This is needless. Chapter 7 continues this, but praises the role of poetry as a descriptive art. Lessing spends most of the chapter criticising Joseph Spence’s Polymetis for denigrating classical poetic ability in favour of classical visual artistry.

Chapter 4 defends poetic depictions of Philoctetes showing emotion against judgments from Adam Smith (that one) and Cicero against the propriety of doing so. Chapter 5 speculates on the original depiction of Laocoön being devoured by the serpents (whether it was an invention of Virgil or the statue). Defends the nude depiction of Laocoön as being due to the Greek striving for beauty.

Chapter 3 continues the defence of Laocoön’s depiction, wherein Lessing asserts that visual artists cannot depict the moment of climax in a scene, unless they wish to dull the imaginative effect of the moment. Thus, Laocoön could not have been depicted as screaming, and must be depicted, in visual art, in the moments before or after this occurs. Lessing is fairly thorough but his assertions are antiquated.