If you want properly to commit to your memory something that you have learnt, proceed in this manner—namely, when you have drawn one object so often that you believe you can remember it, try to draw it without the model, after having traced your model on a thin sheet of glass. This glass you will then lay upon the drawing which you have made without model. Observe well where the tracing does not tally with your drawing, and wherever you find that you have gone wrong, you must remember not to go wrong again. You should even return to the model, in order again to draw the wrong passage until it shall be fixed in your memory. And if you have no level sheet of glass for tracing, take a very thin sheet of goat-parchment, well oiled, and then dried. And after the tracing has done service for your drawing, you can efface it with a sponge and use it again for another tracing.
On Studying in Bed
I have experienced upon myself that it is of no small benefit if, when you are in bed, you apply your imagination to repeating the superficial lines of the forms which you have been studying, or to other remarkable things which are comprehensible to a fine intellect. This is a praiseworthy and useful action which will help you to fix things in your memory.
[GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING]
Laocoon
In 1766, while acting as secretary to the governor of Breslau, Lessing wrote his celebrated "Laocoon," a critical treatise defining the limits of poetry and the plastic arts. The epitome given here has been prepared from the German text. A short biographical sketch of Lessing appears in the introduction to his play, "Nathan the Wise," appearing in Volume XVII of The World's Greatest Books.
I.—On the Limits of Painting and Poetry
Winkelman has pronounced a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, displayed in the posture no less than in the expression, to be the characteristic feature common to all the Greek masterpieces of painting and sculpture. "As," says he, "the depths of the sea always remain calm, however violently the surface may rage, so the expression in the figures of the Greeks, under every form of passion, shows a great and self-collected soul.