Practice question · Multiple choice
Why does Lessing argue that painting should choose the moment just before a climax?
Hints
- Painting arranges bodies in space and cannot narrate a sequence.
- If only one moment is available, which one leaves most to the viewer?
Show the answer
A. A single image must fix one instant, and the instant before invites the viewer to complete the action
Why
Because a painting has one instant to spend. Lessing's argument is that the moment before the climax leaves the outcome to be completed by the viewer, while the climax itself fixes and exhausts it. The advice follows from the medium rather than from decorum, which is what makes it an argument rather than a taste.
Practise The Classification of the Arts
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Art History I is free to start.
More questions on The Classification of the Arts
- Arrange these contributions to the classification of the arts in order.
- The grouping of painting, sculpture, music, poetry and dance as "the fine arts" dates from antiquity.
- Complete the account of the system of the arts.
- Which exclusions were built into the eighteenth-century system of the fine arts?
- How many arts did Batteux group together as the fine arts on his shared principle?
- The classical concepts of technē and ars encompassed skilled practices like medicine, whereas the…
- Hegel ordered the arts by how far the material is subordinated to the idea.
- Roughly how many centuries old is the grouping we call "the fine arts"?