Laocoon, or about the boundaries of painting and poetry. Lessing G.E.

A small treatise of the German poet, playwright, philosopher, theorist of art and literary critic of the Enlightenment of Gotthold Efraim Lessing “Laocoon, or about the boundaries of painting and poetry” (1766) became one of the cornerstones of new European aesthetics. Where are the boundaries of the plastic arts and arts of the word, between which classical artistic thought established a compliance system, claiming that “painting is dumb poetry”, and “poetry is talking painting”? How do different arts work with the categories of space and time, what role do the concepts of statics and dynamics play in each of them? What is a “fruitful moment” in painting and sculpture and how is it related to the laws of human perception? How is the expressive means of a particular type of art, its “technique” and “material” affect the nature of the image? On these and other questions, a treatise of Lessing gives unexpected, innovative, sometimes refuting the centuries -old aesthetic tradition answers.