gotthold ephraim lessing 1729–1781 - St. Francis Xavier University

470 / GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING
praise and raised him far above another, unknown paint er who was foolish
enough to depict Medea at the height of her rage, thus endowing her brief
instant of madness with a permanence that is an affront to all nature.
* * *
From Chapter Nine
If we wish to compare the paint er and the poet in par tic u lar instances, we
must first know whether they both enjoyed complete freedom; whether, that
is to say, they could work toward producing the greatest possible effect in
their respective arts without any external constraint.
Religion often represented just such an external constraint on the classical
artist. His work, destined for worship and devotion, could not always be
as perfect as it would have been if he had had as his sole aim the plea sure
of his spectators. But superstition overloaded the gods with symbols, and
the most beautiful gods were not always honored as such.
In the temple at Lemnos, from which the pious Hypsipyle 9 rescued her
father in the disguise of the god, Bacchus was represented with horns. No
doubt he appeared this way in all his temples since the horns were symbolic
and one of his necessary attributes. Only the free artist, who did not have
to create his Bacchus for some temple, omitted this symbol; and if we find
none with horns among the extant statues of him, we may perhaps take this
as proof that none of them belongs among the consecrated ones under
which he was actually worshiped. Besides this, it is highly probable that the
wrath of pious iconoclasts during the first centuries of Christianity fell in
great part on these latter. Only seldom did they spare a work of art, because
it had not been desecrated by adoration.
However, since pieces of both kinds are to be found among the excavated
objects of antiquity, I should prefer that only those be called works of art in
which the artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty
was his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too obvious
traces of religious conventions, deserves this name because in their case
the artist did not create for art’s sake, 1 but his art was merely a handmaid of
religion, which stressed meaning more than beauty in the material subjects
it allotted to art for execution. By this I do not mean to say that religion has
not also frequently sacrificed meaning for beauty, or, out of consideration
for art and the more refined taste of the period, has ceased to emphasize it
to such a degree that beauty alone would seem to be the sole object.
* * *
From Chapter Ten
I comment on an expression of astonishment in Spence 2 which clearly
shows how little thought he must have given to the limits of poetry and
painting. “As to the muses in general,” he says, “it is strange that the poets
9. Daughter of King Thaos, the son of Dionysus;
the women of the island of Lemnos killed all the
other men, who had left their wives for Thracian
women.
1. Possibly the first use of the expression “art for
art’s sake.”
2. Joseph Spence (1699– 1768), an Oxford professor
whose Polymetis (1747), written in dialogues,
is one of the targets of Lessing’s criticism.