Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Lessing wrote extensively on the subjects of philosophy and aesthetics and was one of the key figures of the Enlightenment period, alongside figures such as Immanuel Kant, Christian Wolff, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. He wrote plays that aimed to free German drama from the influence of classical and French models. In his critical essays, Lessing condemned conservative dogmatism and cant, cautioned against bias, and asserted the value of religious and intellectual tolerance. Lessing was born on Jan. 22, 1729, in Kamenz, Upper Lusatia, Saxony, Germany, and died on February 15, 1781, in Braunschweig, Brunswick, Germany.

Drawing comparisons between painting and poetry were a significant tenet of eighteenth-century critical theory, and Lessing participated in debates concerning this subject. In his Laocoön, he distinguished between the spatial properties of painting and the temporal properties of poetry, proposing rules regarding the appropriate means of imitation for each art form based on this difference. The fundamental difference between the visual and the literary mediums that Lessing drew attention to and explored is that the former capture their subjects in a single, static instant, whereas literature, poetry, and later film, like music, flows sequentially across time.

The statue of Laocoön and His Sons, also called the Laocoön Group

Lessing proposed that the work of painters and sculptors is confined to a single moment that they can capture in its entirety. This, in turn, specifies the rules through which beauty can be achieved. In Lessing's line of reasoning, if the Laocoön sculptors had tried to imitate Virgil by depicting Laocoön distorted face while he screamed, the viewer would find the image's immediate effect repellent, and they would have failed to evoke the true feeling of the scene because sculpture was incapable of capturing its movement and action.

Although Lessing differentiated poetry as an expression of temporal action and painting as a spatial, static presentation, and insisted that both abide by a different set of rules, he did not entirely separate the art forms. He maintained that they share the object, beauty, as well as the effect, pleasure. Lessing’s argument is that neither poetry nor painting can reach this common objective without being restricted to the particular rules inherent in each art form.

According to Lessing, the visual arts of that time were confined to a single "pregnant moment," and in order to capture it, the sculptors had to abstract the segments of the scene that would convey the ideal beauty and appropriate restraint. Virgil, on the other hand, in his literary telling of the Laocoön story, could portray change and development—owing to the temporal, sequential nature of poetry, which imitates action instead of objects, and the sequence of words corresponding to a sequence of events. Thus, in Lessing's view, the scream and the associated emotion are immediately qualified by what appears before and what follows, and as a result, instead of evoking negative emotions such as disgust, they are changed and qualified. Moreover, Lessing insisted that in each case the aesthetic whole should be considered.

While painting and sculpture gain a certain immediacy from their presentational forms, that very immediacy restricts them to a concrete, visual presence that makes it difficult for them to escape the present moment. When painting becomes allegorical in order to try to enhance its significance, it violates its own spatial rules. Poetry, on the other hand, is not subject to such limitations. It appeals to the imagination, not actual vision, and can therefore depict emotions as well as objects. Additionally, it can use its extensive, moving forms to go beyond the mundane to the significance of beauty itself. The temporal forms of poetry enhance its effects while the spatial forms of painting act as limits.

Statue of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the Gänsemarkt in Hamburg

However, Lessing saw temporality as an aspect of the Laocoön sculpture and suggested that it contains a juxtaposition of spatial and temporal categories of thought. In that way, Lessing saw poetry and painting as correlated and not completely distinct categories, and was one of the first theorists of intermediality. He compared the amateur, philosopher, and the critic with respect to discerning this similarity between poetry and painting. In Lessing's theory, the amateur observer senses the similarity, the philosopher finds and articulates laws to help elucidate it, and the critic finds the specific shared attributes between poetry and painting—ways in which one resembles the other.

Lessing asserted that because criticism goes beyond simply stating laws to explaining their practical effect, it is superior to philosophy, which only states laws. Similar to Kant, he saw criticism as a further stage of reflection on philosophy. The term “ekphrasis” is used to identify presentations of works of visual art in a literary form (a roughly analogous term, Bildbeschreibung, is used in German). One implication of the word concerns literature's attempt at expressing a word-image—a verbal equivalent of the visual icon that is the source subject.

In Lessing's view, the Greek epic poet Homer, for instance, does not describe a single object frozen in time, but rather how it is assembled and of what elements it is composed. While a Homeric description of a person or an object might seem synchronic, suspended at a single point in time, in its focus on assemblage it transpires through time. The idea of viewing aesthetic objects through a spatiotemporal lens can also be found in Kant's philosophy, and the introduction of perceptual and psychological factors add nuance to the classical formula presented by the Roman lyric poet Horace in his Ars Poetica, “Ut pictura poesis,” which translates to "as is painting so is poetry."

Lessing's grave at Magnifriedhof cemetery, Brunswick, Germany

Being extremely poor, in 1770 Lessing was forced to accept the badly paid post of librarian at Wolfenbüttel, where he spent the last decade of his life. His final work, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts (1780; The Education of the Human Race), is a treatise expressing his conviction that the human race is perfectible. In the history of the world’s religions, Lessing discerned a developing moral awareness that would, he believed, eventually establish a peaceful, morally free society capable of transcending all dogmas and doctrines.

During this decade, Lessing's health began to deteriorate. In October 1776 he married Eva König, the widow of a Hamburg merchant and a longtime friend. In December 1777 she gave birth to their only child, a son, but he died soon after, and his wife died the following month. Lessing’s last years were lonely and impoverished. On February 15, 1781, he died at age fifty-two during a visit to the wine dealer Angott in Braunschweig.