The present volume brings together some of the papers presented at the Seminar "Laocoon 2000" (Laocoonte 2000) which was sponsored by the International Study Center on Aesthetics (Palermo, November 1-2, 1996).

Luigi Russo, Laocoon and the History of Aesthetics
On its re-discovery in Rome in January 1506, the sculpture of Laocoon with his sons and the serpents which had already been famous in antiquity (re)entered Western culture and took on a profoundly important role within it. On the basis of the well-known comment by Pliny («opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae artis praeferendum»), it was accepted as the greatest masterpiece of ancient art and there developed around it an artistic cult into which whole generations of artists and art-lovers threw themselves more or less wholeheartedly for centuries. However, in the second half of the 18th century, the Laocoon took on an even more significant role at the birth of modern Aesthetics, an event in which numerous scholars can be said to have participated (Baumgarten, Batteux, Burke, Winckelmann, Lessing, etc.). Winckelmann took the Laocoon to be «the perfect rule of art» and created around this work an aesthetic universe dedicated to "ideal beauty". Lessing, however, opposed Winckelmann's position and offered a complete inversion of its point of view in his study not by chance entitled Laocoon. From this point onwards, Lessing's study became the major theoretical reference point for all modern aesthetic thought. It would seem to maintain such a position even today, offering still valuable stimulus to philosophical enquiry, as can be seen, for example, in Arnheim's study entitled New Laocoon.

Bernard Andreae,Why is the priest Laocoon so big in comparison with his sons and why is his hair long and dishevelled?
A careful analysis of important recent archaeological discoveries at Sperloga and Baja (where Athenodorus, Agesander and Polydorus, the creators of the Laocoon worked) and a new interpretation of Pliny's comment on the work (Pliny intended «statuaria ars» to mean «the technique of casting in bronze» and this would suggest that he did not in fact consider the Laocoon group to exceed all other works of sculpture and painting, but rather that it was superior to all other representations of the theme in painting and bronze) mean that the Laocoon can be seen today in a totally new light. New hypotheses can be made, in addition, about the commissioning of the work, probably within the realm of influence of the Pergamene school, and the meaning of this marble group which can probably be related to the Hellenistic treatment of the particular Roman Pergamene political context. Such a meaning was maintained even after the discovery of the Laocoon in the Renaissance and still today it can be read as a warning against war.

Giovanni Saverio Santangelo, A missed opportunity: Lessing and Mme Dacier
The name of Anne Le Fèvre Dacier may be added to the numerous French writers with whose works Lessing was acquainted. There is no doubt at all that Lessing had first hand knowledge of Mme Dacier's work, even if he was not always successful in distinguishing her from her husband André, a famous commentator on Aristotle from whom Lessing loved to differ. It would seem, however, that with respect to Mme Dacier, Lessing was unnecessarily unappreciative of a writer whose critical ideas should (and would, he had allowed them a hearing) have struck a sympathetic chord within him. Lessing was not able to recognize the deep and everincreasing relevance of the critical work which Mme Dacier had undertaken, long before Lessing himself, on the works of Terence. The explanation for this non-reception of Mme Dacier's "poetics" seems to lie in the fact that Lessing considered her to be part of the "tragédies classique" school of criticism with which he was engaged in sharp polemics. Thus, even though Lessing held all the critical credentials to enable a fruitful intellectual encounter and exchange with Mme Dacier, he denied himself the opportunity through misjudged closedmindedness and erroneous "a priori" refusals to consider certain ideas.

Michele Cometa, Laocoon from Lessing to Schelling
Goethe's study on the Laocoon sculpture (1797) may be seen as the last stage of an interpretative tradition which began with Winckelmann's seminal study and reached its highest point of influence in European culture with Lessing's famous work which swept away the vestiges of Renaissance and Baroque aesthetic rules and ushered in a new, but by no means less rigorous, aesthetic which in turn gave rise to unexpected developments, ranging from neo-Classical purism to neo-Romantic eclecticism. Goethe's study forms an integral part of this tradition but nonetheless may be seen as the most coherent theoretical refutation of the critical line inaugurated by Winckelmann and by Lessing, both of whom saw the group, though from diametrically opposed points of view, uniquely as an "exemplum" of the triumph of the Greek model. While breaking with this line of interpretation, Goethe's study also developed and brought to fruition the purely art-historic intuitions of Herder, Hirst and Heinse. Thus for the first time in the history of interpretation of the Laocoon within German culture, the sculpture was, at the hands of Goethe, stripped of all ideological and aesthetic implication, with a thoroughness which only an approach totally free of any direct polemic could guarantee, and was read and described for what in fact it is: the sublime artistic representation of a tragic event. Goethe's important study formed the starting point for a series of subtle threads which carried the theoretical tension which he had generated through this interpretation to the major aesthetics of German idealism, beginning with Schelling who, in Über das Verhältnis der bildenden Künste zu der Natur (1809), repays his debt with the German Klassik aesthetics.

Vittorio Fagone, Laocoon: a "necessary error"?
The expression "necessary error" is here used in order to make a critical re-reading of Lessing's contemporary cultural context. Lessing himself used this term in a very different sense in his study on theatre and had originally found the term in Schlegel. Originally it indicated, according to the definition given by Tzvetan Todorov in his Théories du Symbole (1977), a breaking away from the original within the genre of imitation made by the author in order to preserve the "harmony of the whole" being offered to the reader. Given the fact that Lessing's Laocoon may be seen as a milestone in modern Aesthetics due to its much debated distinction between the arts of space and the arts of time, a conception which had a fundamental influence on the development of the arts in the neo-Classical period, we can see that this distinction involves two kinds of "necessary errors". The first of these is the supremacy which Lessing accords to poetry over all forms of plastic representation and the immobilization of any formative, but above all expressive, dynamics which the works of figurative art might have. This study attempts to analyse the contemporary mutation which these two basic "topoi" of the Laocoon have undergone, while taking into account the present implications of the idea of illusion, a so typical concept of Lessing's period, which reappears today in terms of the "artificial" and the "virtual".

Gianfranco Marrone, Arts of time and arts of appearance
Leaving aside the historical, interpretative problems related to Lessing's study, his Laocoon has also given rise within the history of Aesthetics to a tradition using the text as a means of inventing new categories developed within the field of semiotics to seek for what is termed the artistic "specific" ("specifico artistico") forms part of this tradition. It uses Lessing's famous distinction between the arts of time and the arts of space, but has not so far been able to reach any satisfying conclusion. On the basis of certain new directions in semiotic thought, however, Lessing's Laocoon can offer a more fruitful critical method. Using the recently-developed semiotic idea of translatability as essential precondition for all languages, the Laocoon can be seen to contain the distinction between the arts of time (narrative arts) and the arts of appearance (figurative arts). Looked at in this way, the opposition between image and text becomes far less important, for, as Lessing himself recognized, language has an undeniable iconic element and the image has an essential narrative element.

Paolo D'Angelo, The Eternal Laocoon
Lessing's text Laocoon stands apart from the other classics of Aesthetics in the way it has been used through the history of the subject. Later critics have repeatedly returned to Lessing's study not so much to analyse and argue about what it says as rather to resume the original task which the work set itself: to identify the respective limitations of the various arts and to establish their mutual relations. The history of Aesthetics is marked by Nine Laocoons and Paolo D'Angelo looks at a selection of these ranging from Hegel to della Volpe's Laocoonte 1960, from Babbitt's New Laocoon to Arnheim's study of the same name. The examination of these texts leads him to ask the question whether we can discern a pro-Lessing or an anti-Lessing tendency in contemporary aesthetic theory. D'Angelo accepts the latter hypothesis which he demonstrates through the analysis of certain tendencies in modern aesthetics which he sees as moving away from the Lessing-inspired direction of critical thought.

Appendix: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, On Laocoon
With his study On Laocoon, which appeared in the journal "Die Propyläen" in 1797 (and which we here publish for the first time in Italian), Goethe represents the last act of the long season of interpretations of this group which began with Winckelmann and ended with Lessing and at the same time lays the foundations for a mature Classicism aesthetics to which he remained faithful throughout his writings. This article was written during the period of Goethe's closest collaboration with Schiller and within the context of the group of art theorists and artists which had gathered around him at Weimar. It represents the most rigorous refutation of the line of interpretation which reached up to Lessing yet paradoxically seems also to carry to the extreme the experiences of the new classicism which had been inspired precisely by the Winckelmann tradition. At the stylistic level, Goethe's study, with its eloquent "concision" and the semantic solutions which it offers with respect to the interpretation of the Laocoon marble group, marks a turning point in the history of this sculpture's interpretation and later influenced, both Schelling's aesthetics and the aesthetics of post-Idealism.