  Mendelssohn’s thesis that the visual arts must convey all of their content through their representation of an object at a single moment while other arts can represent movements and actions in, as we would say, real time, would be used as a premise in a famous controversy between his friend Lessing and the renowned historian of ancient art Johann Joachim Winckelmann, to which we will turn in a moment. But before doing so, we must complete our survey of Mendelssohn’s aesthetics with a comment on his discussion of the sublime.