It is only by turning to Lessing's theoretical works that a reason for
the connection between the ugly Mendelssohn and Nathan can be
understood. Lessing addresses the question of what beauty and ugliness
consists of in his 1766 Laokoon. He positions his work as a response to
Gottlieb Baumgarten's Aesthetica, despite only referring to him once.11
Laokoon is not an aesthetic treatise in the same sense as that of Edmund
Burke or Immanuel Kant;12 rather, it exposes the different function of
beauty and ugliness in painting and poetry. Lessing provides specific
examples of beauty and ugliness, and demonstrates how the medium
affects a work of art. Lessing's treatise begins as a discussion of the
statue Laokoon, but quickly moves to a discussion of the problems of
representing the body. He begins the "Vorrede" with a definition of
beauty as: "Die Schonheit, deren Begriff wir zuerst von korperlichen
Gegenstanden abziehen" (Lessing 1964). In defining it thus, Lessing
posits beauty as a physical, corporeal manifestation. The body becomes a
divisible plane according to Lessing's usage of Gegenstand, an
ambiguous word choice because it possesses a multitude of meanings:
piece, part, object, subject-matter or subject.
Lessing's fascination with the Laokoon statue resides in how the
potential for ugliness is avoided. Drawing on the example of ancient
" See Benjamin Bennett's (Bennett 1993) or David Wellbery's (Wellbery 1984) for more lengthy
discussions about Lessing's aesthetics.
12 Lessing reviewed Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and
Beautiful and critized Burke's concept of beauty: "alle angenehmen Begriffe sind undeutliche
Vorstellungen einer Vollkommenheit" (Lessing 1998).
47