The first of these he finds among the ancients, the
second with Raphael, the third with Correggio, the fourth with Titian.
Mengs does not succeed in rising above this empiricism of the studio,
save to declaim about the beauty of nature, virtue, forms, and
proportions, and indeed everything, including the First Cause, which is
the most beautiful of all.
The name of G.E. Lessing (1766) is well known to all concerned with art
problems. The ideas of Winckelmann reappear in Lessing, with less of a
metaphysical tinge. For Lessing, the end of art is the pleasing, and
since this is "a superfluous thing," he thought that the legislator
should not allow to art the liberty indispensable to science, which
seeks the truth, necessary to the soul. For the Greeks painting was, as
it should always be, "imitation of beautiful bodies." Everything
disagreeable or ill-formed should be excluded from painting. "Painting,
as clever imitation, may imitate deformity. Painting, as a fine art,
does not permit this." He was more inclined to admit deformity in
poetry, as there it is less shocking, and the poet can make use of it to
produce in us certain feelings, such as the ridiculous or the terrible.
In his _Dramaturgie_ (1767), Lessing followed the Peripatetics, and
believed that the rules of Aristotle were as absolute as the theorems of
Euclid. His polemic against the French school is chiefly directed to
claiming a place in poetry for the verisimilar, as against absolute
historical exactitude.
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