Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

BEAUTIFUL AND SUBLIME
“beautiful statues and pictures” of the gods, seldom represented without an
accompanying serpent; at night, “the bewildering dream called up the image of
the reptile,” and it was this “adulterous phantasy” that affected the child to be. 41
The idea that visual imagery can have a formative effect on the unborn 42
expresses a concern about the confusion of genres, here explicitly linked to the
confusion of genders. As W. J. T. Mitchell has pointed out, the joining of serpent
and beautiful god in a statue is a grotesque mingling of forms that Lessing considered
antithetical: of the emblematic, proper to poetry, with the mimetic,
proper to the visual arts. 43 The monstrous coupling of artistic genres can be
described as a confusion of the beautiful and the sublime. In Lessing’s eyes, “Art
in these later days has been assigned far wider boundaries” than the ancients
allowed. “Let her imitative hand, folks say, stretch out to the whole of visible
nature, of which the Beautiful is only a small part.” 44 Confusion of forms is possible,
because painting can suggest action, as poetry can suggest the experience
of physical beauty. But it is essential, if both forms are to achieve their highest
possibilities, to keep each within its allotted domain. Furthermore, distinction, as
usual, is also hierarchy. For Burke, as we saw, while “poetry and rhetoric do not
succeed in exact description as well as painting does,” they “are more capable of
making deep and lively impressions than any other arts, and even than nature
itself in very many cases.” 45 Lessing decried the modern critics’ tendency to
ignore this hierarchy of genre power as a mode of aesthetic violence: “Now they
force poetry into the narrower bounds of painting; and again, they propose to
painting to fill the whole wide sphere of poetry.” 46
There is more involved in these thematics than some writers’ defense of the
traditional supremacy of their art in the face of the rising social status of painting.
Given the gendered charge carried by poetry and painting, as the arts of the
41 Ibid., p. 64.
42 Curiously, Lessing fails to note that the eponymous sculpture his book takes as exemplar of the
true powers of the visual arts is itself an image combining beautiful bodies and serpent emissaries
of the divine.
Although it was challenged by Enlightenment science, “the belief in a woman’s power to
imprint upon her baby whatever was in her imagination at the moment of conception or during
pregnancy was widely accepted within both regular medicine and popular culture.” Roy Porter,
“‘The secrets of generation display’d’: Aristotle’s Master Piece in eighteenth-century England,”
in Robert P. Maccubbin (ed.), ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 11. Porter mentions also the idea that
“monsters”—severely malformed children—may be products of the mother’s copulation with an
animal or even with a demon. The idea that the mother’s imagination can affect the form of her
child is still to be found in Professor T. W. Shannon’s Self Knowledge and Guide to Sex Instruction
(Marietta, Ohio: Mulliken, 1913), primarily a tract against masturbation, under the heading of
“Prenatal training.”
43 W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 109.
44 Lessing, Laocoön, p. 66.
45 Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 172, 173.
46 Lessing, Laocoön, p. 59.
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