I should prefer that only those be called works of art in which the artist had occasion to show himself as such and in which beauty was his first and ultimate aim. None of the others, which betray too obvious traces of religious conventions, deserves this name because in their case the artist did not create for art’s sake [weil die Kunst hier nicht um ihren selbst willen gearbeitet, literally “because here art did not work for its own sake”], but his art was merely a handmaid of religion, which stressed meaning more than beauty in the material subjects it allotted to art for execution. (Laocoön, chapter 1, pp. 15, 17)