Laocoon, or about the boundaries of painting and poetry

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 plastic arts and arts of the word that classical artistic thought established a system of conformity, 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 connected with the laws of human perception? How is the expressive means of this or that 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 of aesthetic tradition answers