Poetry vs Visual Art in Lessing’s Laocoon

A R T L▼R K

On the 22nd of January 1729, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born in Kamenz, Saxony, Germany. He was a precocious writer, philosopher, publicist, art critic, the first real playwright in theatre history and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment. As a literary theorist, he is well-known for his essay Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). There is a predominant theme in the culture of  Enlightenment: that semiotics and aesthetics are...