  Lessing, as we saw, had argued that visual art presents an object as it is at a single moment and thus can only intimate an action, while poetry describes a succession of states comprising an action and thus can represent an object only by describing the act of producing it; he also argued that beauty is the first law of the visual arts and thus that a work of art must not only depict an object at a pregnant moment in an action or event but must also depict it at a beautiful moment. In his critique in the first of his Groves of Criticism, Herder argues that Lessing’s division of the arts was too schematic and incomplete, offering three particular points of criticism against Lessing. He first claims that Lessing fails to explain why beauty must be the first law of the visual arts. He further insists that there is an essential difference within the so-called visual arts that Lessing fails to capture, namely that painting is concerned strictly with with the sense of sight whereas the aesthetics of sculpture in fact derive primarily from the sense of touch. Herder’s third critical thesis is that Lessing’s emphasis on time and succession in poetry better fits the art of music, which Lessing ignored, while the essence of poetry lies not in such an accidental feature of the kind of signs that it uses but in the way in which it captures and communicates the energy of real life, something no other art does equally well. Herder’s contrast between painting and sculpture becomes central in the argument of the fourth of the Groves of Criticism and in the essay on Sculpture, so let us consider the other two themes first and then return to that one.