Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry ed. by Avi Lifschitz, Michael Squire (review)

Lifschitz and Squire have assembled a set of essays on Lessing’s Laocoon, in honor of the 250^th anniversary of its publication. The contributors come from a broad range of disciplines including archaeology, art history, classics, literature, and philosophy. This volume serves as a useful resource for those interested in Lessing’s work and its contributions to aesthetics.

This volume’s strengths are many. For anyone approaching Laocoon for the first time, it offers an excellent entryway into the central issues in Lessing’s text and the debates that have arisen between scholars over the past 250 years. The book’s organization makes it easy to read selectively, according to the interests of the reader. Yet this strength is also one of the book’s weaknesses. It is better read piecemeal than as a whole. When it is read as a whole, there tends to be an excess of repetition. Lessing’s text is framed and placed in context over and over again. This can be tiresome when encountered in nearly every chapter.

Lessing’s Laocoon is itself a strange work, whose peculiarities are often overlooked due to its status as a canonical work of aesthetics. Lessing himself describes it as “more of a disordered collectanea for a book, than a book.” The work’s title is derived from Lessing’s discussion of the difference between the representation of the Laocoon myth in the famous sculpture held in the Vatican and in Virgil’s Aeneid. Lessing’s central question concerns what each of these forms of representation can do most effectively. What can sculpture, or the visual arts more generally, do that cannot be done as effectively in poetry, or the literary arts? That is, as the subtitle of Lessing’s book asks, what are the proper Grenzen (limits or borders) of poetry and sculpture?

One lesson that runs through many of the essays (such as those of Luca Giuliani and David Wellbery) is that Lessing’s account of the boundaries of the arts can only be made compelling if we generalize from sculpture and poetry to a broader set of categories. Some contributors (Frederick Beiser, Avi Lifschitz, and W. J. T. Mitchell) keep their focus on the fine arts, and work out accounts of the accuracy and usefulness of Lessing’s conception of the difference between the visual and literary arts. Jürgen Trabant goes even further, using Lessing as an occasion to reflect on the difference between linguistic and imagistic cognition as such. For those interested in these issues, the volume offers much of value.

There are a few issues that could have been more fully addressed in the volume. The first is the adequacy of Lessing’s own theory for forms of art that combine the literary and the visual that emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, such as film and Wagner’s conception of Gesamtkunstwerk. The second is an oddity of Lessing’s own work: he never actually beheld the sculpture that is given pride of place in his essay. This matter is mentioned a few times, but its potential significance is not explored in much detail. The arc of Lessing’s argument, as several contributors note, tends to defend the superiority of the literary over the visual arts. One wonders if his lack of interest in seeing the Laocoon statue evidences a merely personal proclivity for language over and against the visual arts, rather than his ranking of them being the product of careful reflection on each medium.

One final concern is this volume’s inclusion in Oxford University Press’ Classical Presences series. The justification for it seems to be that Lessing’s text discusses the Laocoon statue, as well as works of Greek and Latin literature. However, Lessing’s work seems to be at its weakest when read...