The "I" and the "Eye" : The Verbal and the Visual in Post-Renaissance Western Aesthetics

The paradigmatic moment of the opposition between the verbal and the visual arts may be seen in Lessing's treatise on the Laocooen sculptural group, written in 1766; a moment that is identified within a historical framework of modern aesthetics that begins with Lessing, goes through Pater, and then culminates in Greenberg.

The author delineates the opposition as a history of diffusions, displacements and idealist reparations of class division.