I tried to draft an English text to recommend Lessings “Laokoon” until I found the short but very good Customer Review “The Godfather or Art Critizism” from M. Schroads from Florida, which expresses the book very neutral and good: amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ … 47-7967329
(or in German if somebody is interested: amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3 … 36-0459232 )
This is a really amazing book and still actual. It is a recommendation for all, who are interested in art theory, art philosophy and is written in a very poetic style. This book influenced many artists, e.g. Max Klinger, which is one of my most favourit artists. I just read it and I’m sure, I will give more impressions soon. My philosophical knewledge is not very strong and very restricted to art, in particular fine arts and literature. Please see this recommendation and thread from this point of view and please do not suspect deep philosophical discussions but discussions about art in general. I’m not really sure, where there is the border between art, art theory and art philosophy. For me, the borders are very vague and I have difficulties to get structure in this very extended and evaluating matter.
I am currently reading, (amongst other stuff,) “Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic†translated from the Italian of Benedetto Croce by Douglas Ainslie, London, 1909.
This is what it says of Lessing’s theory of the limits of the arts,
thank you very much for writing this text down for me in this thread ! I just made a printout and will look for some words in the dictionary to have the full and unambiguous meaning of this text, will continue to read the Laocoon and will write my opinion at a later date. Anyway, even if Lessing would not be right/is not right in a couple of points, there are very interesting ideas to find in his book. Lessing tried to find the psychology behind some of the effects of art on us. This is remarkable in the time he lived. And I was surprised about the psychological way, with which Lessing looked at the effects of art. I will come back later…
“Leonardo da Vinci had declared his personal predilection for painting, Michael Angelo for sculpture, but the question had not been philosophically treated before Lessing.”
While not a philosophical treatment per se, certainly philosophical in import, Gottfried Semper’s influential “Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics” (1860, 1863) does pose and attempt to answer the question. An exhaustive historical survey of the forms, types and symbols of Technical Art aesthetics as found in everything from textiles to ceramics, to all built and hung, it decides favorably on behalf of Architecture and its principle trope the woven fabric.
A relevant quote, promoting his philosophical overview:
“Surrounded by a world of wonder and forces whose laws we may divine, may wish to understand but will never decipher, that touch us only in a few fragmentary harmonies and suspend our souls in a continuous state of unresolved tension, we conjure up in play the perfection that is lacking. We make for ourselves a tiny world in which the cosmic law is evident within the strictest of limits, yet complete in itself and perfect in this respect. In such play we satisfy our cosmogonic instinct.”
Semper was a great architect and his opera in Dresden is a classical masterpiece! I did not know his writing “Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts; or, Practical Aesthetics” and thank you a lot for this tip (will look for more information)!
His theoretical influence, principally through this text, dwarfs his architectural influence. He was the theorectical bridge between the Classical and the Modern. He was one of the first, though certainly not the first, to emphasize the painted nature of Greek sculpture and marble and the role of the “covering†in surfaced and structure, the primacy of the material in determining form. This text heavily shaped the minds of the coming early modernists, both in Germany and in America. It lost its historical relevance I suspect largely due to its survey form, comprehensive length (almost a thousand pages) and his estrangement from Germany and move to England. (He actually bought a boat ticket to America early on, a voyage that would most probably have altered, or at least accelerated, the course of American Modernism itself). It became a text without a home. Only now I believe has it been offered in English translation, and his influence is being rediscovered, re-emphasized outside of architectural theory circles.