Abstract
- The conceptual boundary between pleasure and voluptuousness was ambiguous in eighteenth-century German culture, and both terms were associated with sodomy as can be seen in the overlapping definitions of "Lust," "Wollust," and "Sodomie" in Johann Heinrich Zedler's "Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste" (1732-1754). In a collection of anacreontic poetry, "Kleinigkeiten" (1751), and the essays "Rettungen des Horaz" (1754) and "Laokoon, oder über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie" (1766), Gotthold Ephraim Lessing celebrated art's potential to arouse the art lover, but the ambivalent status of voluptuous pleasure risked linking art reception to sodomy. Lessing responded to this dilemma by establishing a model of art criticism that promoted normative pleasure in art while censuring other possibilities as sodomitical.