PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

Lessing's esthetic theory of (com)passion has to be seen with regard to his "material" vision of the arts: The effects that visual and poetic arts have to produce since antiquity don't follow from a preconceived norm, but from the artist's sensual conscience of his material. Thus, the marble's beauty suggests coldness and death, words and speech suggest movement and life. In this manner, Lessing contrasts Winckelmann's idea about the Ancient's aspiration to idealism with a theory of "material" imagination. In order to encourage passion, the Ancients did represent the abhorrent and ugly, but only until the moment when beauty prevails over other sensual expressions of life and death, because aesthetic pleasure cannot arise from beauty itself Thus, Lessing challenges classicism and anticipates Romanticism as can be shown by referring to Goethe, Delacroix, Byron and Baudelaire.