The demands of beauty in visual art cannot be reconciled with pain depicted in its full disfiguring violence

The demands of beauty could not be reconciled with [his] pain in all its disfiguring violence, so it had to be reduced. The scream had to be softened to a sigh, not because screaming betrays an ignoble soul, but because it distorts the features in a disgusting manner. (Laocoön, chapter 1, pp. 15, 17)