This play is about the boundaries of painting and poetry, its possibilities and many other topics related to the ancient art that raises Lessing as "incidental" but, in fact, serve to make a critique of several large authors of his time, including Winckelmann. In the Laocoon, Lessing questions the authors identify some of his time were between poetry and painting, which will, in his view, to the detriment of both. Incidental observations lead him to show why poetry and painting away from each other to imitate, because of their own nature --a more suitable for temporal and one for the espacial--, which imposes limits on each of the arts. To illustrate his argument is based on the case of the Laocoon, the title of the book, comparing the description of Virgil with the statue that represents it. Lessing uses many other examples, very learned, to show what the ideal relationship between poetry and painting are, and to underscore the idea that, among the ancients beauty was the highest law of the plastic arts, which had to subordinate all other considerations, including the same expression.