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From Winkelmann’S Apollo To Nietzsche’S Dionysus, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

At issue here is the Platonic notion of imitation likewise associated with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s reflection on the complex limits of painting and poetry, exemplar, archetype, ideal. Nietzsche himself echoes Schlegel’s own citation of Winckelmann in his comparison of Greek tragedy and sculpture, noting the ideal of beauty in balance, as tragic proportion. For August Wilhelm Schlegel, Aeschylus and Sophocles highlight the balance of tension between bodily dynamic poise and spiritual suffering in the case of the Laocoön group, where the boys to either side of the central figure draw the gaze back to the father: the very snakes themselves …