Laocoon : $b An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry. With remarks illustrative of various points in the history of ancient art.Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim
Philosophy
Laocoon : $b An essay upon the limits of painting and poetry. With remarks illustrative of various points in the history of ancient art.
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim
Aesthetics -- Early works to 1800; Agesander. Laocoön group
Serta patri, juvenisque comam vestisque Lyæi
Induit, et medium curru locat; æraque circum
Tympanaque et plenas tacita formidine cistas.
Ipsa sinus hederisque ligat famularibus artus;
Pampineamque quatit ventosis ictibus hastam,
Respiciens; teneat virides velatus habenas
Ut pater, et nivea tumeant ut cornua mitra,
Et sacer ut Bacchum referat scyphus.
“The maid clothes her father with the garlands, the locks and the
garments of Bacchus, and places him in the centre of the chariot; around
him the brazen drums and the boxes filled with nameless terror; herself,
looking back, binds his hair and limbs with ivy and strikes windy blows
with the vine-wreathed spear; veiled like the father she holds the green
reins; the horns project under the white turban, and the sacred goblet
tells of Bacchus.”
The word “tumeant,” in the last line but one, would seem to imply that
the horns were not so small as Spence fancies.
Note 22, p. 62.
The so-called Bacchus in the garden of the Medicis at Rome (Montfaucon
Suppl. aux Ant. T. 1, p. 254) has little horns growing from the brow.
But for this very reason some critics suppose it to be a faun. And
indeed such natural horns are an insult to the human countenance, and
can only be becoming in beings supposed to occupy a middle station
between men and beasts. The attitude also and the longing looks the
figure casts upward at the grapes, belong more properly to a follower of
the god than to the god himself. I am reminded here of what Clemens
Alexandrinus says of Alexander the Great. (Protrept. p. 48, edit. Pott.)
Ἐβούλετο δὲ καὶ Ἀλέξανδρος Ἄμμωνος υἱὸς εἶναι δοκεῖν, καὶ κερασφόρος
ἀναπλάττεσθαι πρὸς τῶν ἀγαλματοποιῶν, τὸ καλὸν ἀνθρώπου ὑβρίσαι σπεύδων
κέρατι. It was Alexander’s express desire to be represented in his
statue with horns. He was well content with the insult thus done to
human beauty, if only a divine origin might be imputed to him.
Note 23, p. 64.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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