Laocoon : $b An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry. With remarks illustrative of various points in the history of ancient art.

"Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry" by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing is a discussion that compares painting and poetry, probably from the late 1700s. The text looks at how these two art forms show beauty and affect the audience’s feelings in different ways. Lessing uses the story of Laocoon to explain how art can show feelings, beauty, and what each art form can and cannot do. The text starts by questioning old ideas about how art shows feelings, especially suffering, compared to how poetry does it. Lessing thinks both painting and poetry make their own kind of presence, but they use different methods to make you feel something; painting uses visuals, while poetry uses descriptions and stories. Using ancient art and stories as examples, he points out that visual art should focus on beauty, even when showing strong emotions like pain, setting up a deeper look at art and how it impacts how we understand human feelings, using the Laocoon story as a main example.