The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts: Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay
Georg Hegel · en
[Greek: b] Architecture, however, as we have seen, has purified the
external world, and endowed it with symmetrical order and with affinity
to mind; and the temple of the God, the house of his community, stands
ready. Into this temple, then, in the _second_ place, the God enters in
the lightning-flash of individuality, which strikes and permeates the
inert mass, while the infinite[165] and no longer merely symmetrical
form belonging to mind itself concentrates and gives shape to the
corresponding bodily existence. This is the task of _Sculpture_. In
as far as in this art the spiritual inward being which architecture
can but indicate makes itself at home in the sensuous shape and its
external matter, and in as far as these two sides are so adapted to
one another that neither is predominant, sculpture must be assigned
the _classical form of art_ as its fundamental type. For this reason
the sensuous element itself has here no expression which could not
be that of the spiritual element, just as, conversely, sculpture can
represent no spiritual content which does not admit throughout of being
adequately presented to perception in bodily form. Sculpture should
place the spirit before us in its bodily form and in immediate unity
therewith at rest and in peace; and the form should be animated by the
content of spiritual individuality. And so the external sensuous matter
is here no longer manipulated, either in conformity with its mechanical
quality alone, as a mass possessing weight, nor in shapes belonging
to the inorganic world, nor as indifferent to colour, etc.; but it is
wrought in ideal forms of the human figure, and, it must be remarked,
in all three spatial dimensions.
In this last respect we must claim for sculpture, that it is in it that
the inward and spiritual are first revealed in their eternal repose
and essential self-completeness. To such repose and unity with itself
there can correspond only that external shape which itself maintains
its unity and repose. And this is fulfilled by shape in its abstract
spatiality.[166] The spirit which sculpture represents is that which
is solid in itself, not broken up in the play of trivialities and of
passions; and hence its external form too is not abandoned to any
manifold phases of appearance, but appears under this one aspect only,
as the abstraction of space in the whole of its dimensions.