person
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Lessing
also: Lessing G. E.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), German Enlightenment critic and playwright; his Laocoön (1766) — specifically the argument for 'necessary faults' in epic — is the authority Madách invokes to defend the anachronistic speech of Adam and Eve in The Tragedy of Man.
Reading notes
- Correspondence §2 Lessing
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), German Enlightenment critic; his Laocoön (1766) argued that the temporal arts (literature) have freedoms unavailable to the spatial arts (painting), including necessary anachronism in epic.