Well, let us examine a concrete case. The present exhibition of art (1818) contains several pictures, all of which are of one school, the so-called Düsseldorf. Every one of these have borrowed subjects from poetry, and indeed from the emotional side of poetry peculiarly adapted to pictorial representation. The more often and carefully we examine these pictures, the more complete will be our impression of their excessive sweetness and insipidity[281]. In the foregoing contradiction there are present the following general characteristics[282]: (_a_) First, there is the formal ideality of the work of art, that is to say, the element of poetry in its general signification, which is, as the term implies, something composed and brought together by man, which he has taken into his imagination[283] and then actively worked into the artistic composition. (_α_) The nature of the content of such a translation may however, be a matter of indifference or, apart from the artistic representation we thus obtain of common life, may only interest us indirectly for the moment. In this way the Dutch school of painting, for example, has recreated, as it were, by means of human workmanship, the evanescent everyday appearances of natural objects in countless new artistic effects. Velvet, armour, light, horses, work-folk, old cronies, peasants puffing their smoke from old pipe stumps, the glitter of wine in transparent tumblers, rustics in soiled jackets playing with cards as ancient--such and a hundred other subjects like them which trouble us little enough in everyday life, for the best of reasons, that although we too may have our game at cards, our drink, and our gossip we are really occupied with quite another class of interests--all this medley of objects is brought before us in their pictures. Now the claim of art in the representation of such things is precisely this external show, or reappearance of them as a product of spiritual activity, which has transmuted that which was purely external and sensuously material into a new medium supplied by mind. For instead of wool or silk that are tangible, instead of actual hair, glasses, flesh, and metals, all we see now is colour; instead of the three dimensions which are essential to external Nature, we have only superficies; and yet, despite all our losses, we have a representation identical with that of reality.