An attenuated, that is to say, a less metaphysical, echo of Winckelmann's theory is found in Lessing (1766), who infused a new spirit into the literature and social life of the Germany of his time. According to Lessing the aim of art is "delight"; and since delight is a "superfluous thing" it seems reasonable that the legislator should not allow to art that liberty which is indispensable to science in her search for truth, the soul's necessity. For the Greeks painting was what by its nature it ought to be, "the imitation of beautiful bodies." "Its (Hellenic) cultivator represented nothing but the beautiful: common beauty of a low grade served him as an accidental subject, an exercise, a diversion. The attractiveness of his work must depend simply and solely on the perfection of his subject: he was far too true an artist to wish his audience to content itself with the barren pleasure arising from mere resemblance or from the inspection of skilful workmanship: nothing in his art was dearer to him, nothing seemed more noble, than the end at which it aimed."[28] Pictorial representation must exclude everything unpleasing or ugly; "painting as imitation may express ugliness: painting as a fine art will refuse to do so: all visible objects belong to art taken under the former title: the latter may claim only such objects as awaken pleasing sensations." If, on the contrary, ugliness may be represented by the poet, the reason is this: poetic description "conveys a less displeasing sense of bodily malformation which, in the end, almost loses its character as such; unable to use it for itself, the poet uses it as a means to provoke certain mixed feelings (the ridiculous, the terrible), in which we are content to remain, in the absence of any purely pleasant feelings."[29] In his _Dramaturgie_ (1767) Lessing takes his stand upon the Aristotelian _Poetics_: it is well known that not only did he approve of rules in general but he believed those laid down by Aristotle to be as incontrovertible as the theorems of Euclid. His polemic against French writers and critics is waged in the name of probability, not to be confounded with historical accuracy. He understood the universal as a sort of average of what appears in individuals, and catharsis as a conversion of passions into virtuous dispositions, asserting it as beyond doubt that the aim of all poetry is to inspire a love for virtue.[30] He follows the example of Winckelmann in introducing the concept of ideal beauty into the doctrine of figurative art: "expression of corporeal beauty is the aim of painting: therefore supreme beauty of body is the supreme aim of art. But this supreme beauty of body is found in man only, and for him it exists only through the ideal. This ideal may be found among the brute creation in inferior degree; but is entirely absent from vegetable or inanimate nature." Landscape and flower painters are not really artists because "they imitate beauties possessed of no ideal: whereby they work by eye and hand alone, genius having little or no part in their compositions." Nevertheless, Lessing prefers a landscape painter to "the painter of historic pieces who, instead of making beauty his aim, merely depicts a crowd in order to show his cunning in simple expression, not in expression subordinate to beauty."[31] The ideal of bodily beauty then consists "chiefly in the ideal of form, but also in that of texture of the flesh, and in that of permanent expression. Mere colouring and transitory expression have no ideal since nature herself has placed no indelible seal upon them."[32] At the bottom of his heart Lessing dislikes colour; and when he finds the pen-sketches of painters showing "a life, a freedom, a brilliancy never to be found in their painted pictures," he asks himself "whether the most marvellous colouring can compensate so heavy a loss," and whether it is not to be wished "that painting in oils had never been invented"?[33]