 This description of the Laocoön has been of great interest to recent interpreters, but it was Winckelmann’s earlier account that inspired the criticism of Lessing, whose Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, although not published until 1766, was clearly begun and largely written before the appearance of Winckelmann’s History in 1764. Lessing’s work was thus a response to the earlier essay (only in chapter 26, almost at the end of the book, does Lessing say that Winckelmann’s History “has appeared, and I shall not venture another step until I have read it”). Lessing’s book, although part of the larger eighteenth-century debate about the comparative merits of literature and the visual arts that builds upon the division of the arts by his friend Mendelssohn, first argues against Winckelmann that the beauty of the Laocoön statue comes not from the special nobility of the Greek soul but from the particular demands of its visual rather than literary medium.