  The thesis of Laocoön, as already suggested, is that the character of the famous statue is due not to the nobility of the Greek mind but to the imperatives of its visual medium.  Lessing begins his work by quoting the passage from Winckelmann’s essay “On the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks” quoted above (Laocoön, chapter 1, p. 7). He then argues that the Greek, like anyone else, “felt and feared, and he expressed his pain and grief,” and that this was not thought to be incompatible with nobility of soul; he appeals to examples from Homer’s Iliad to prove this point. So he concludes that