LESSING'S LAOCOON IN CONTEXT: Rethinking Lessing's Laocoon. Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the Limits of Painting and Poetry

A newcomer to the discipline of Classical archaeology who frames his essay, in the first lines of its opening chapter, as a critique of Johann Joachim Winckelmann's influential analysis of ancient Greek aesthetics and cultural norms, Lessing presents a disruption to disciplinary tradition that makes of his polemic affronts something of a ‘gay science’ avant la lettre, one that assuredly possesses its own rigour and vitality. [...]the Laocoon has from the beginning provoked readings that alternatively endeavour to evaluate the text's relation to eighteenth-century thought, to later intellectual traditions or to the Classical materials on which it is largely focused; or, either in addition or instead, readings that have sought to underscore the Laocoon’s relevance or limitations as a source for contemporary theory. The volume is appropriately interdisciplinary, bringing together ‘a motley crew of classicists, intellectual historians, philosophers, literary critics, and historians of art (among others)’ (p. 3), including a number of names that will be familiar to anyone who has been following research on the Laocoon in recent years as it has been conducted in particular in Germany, Britain and the US. [...]he reiterates the important point (articulated in his 1986 Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology) that the essay's enduring achievement is not to have realised a clean disentanglement of the arts, but rather to have elaborated the difficulties that face such an attempt, and in so doing to have outlined a theory of ‘intermediality’ (p. xxix) more nuanced and productive than that allowed by the stark demarcation announced in Lessing's subtitle: ‘An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry’.