Laocoon's Body and the Aesthetics of Pain: Winckelmann, Lessing, Herder, Moritz, Goethe

by Simon Richter

Before the sixteenth century, no one had seen the Greek statue, the Laocoon, since antiquity, but popular aesthetic judgment insisted that it was an ideal work of art, the unapproachable model for imitation and aspiration. When in 1506 a vintner found the statue just outside Rome, the contradiction between the ideal and the reality was readily apparent; the statue depicted not a vision of beauty, but the representation of a body in pain. Since the...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0814324045
• ISBN13: 9780814324042
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Length: 231 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.