The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts: Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay — Georg Hegel — John Shaqi
The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts: Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay
Georg Hegel · en
than was possible in the case of architecture and sculpture. The unity
attained, however, is a more inward unity, the weight of which is
thrown wholly on the subjective side, and which, in as far as form and
content are compelled to particularize themselves and give themselves
merely ideal existence, can only come to pass at the expense of the
objective universality of the content and also of its amalgamation with
the immediately sensuous element.[171]
The arts, then, of which form and content exalt themselves to ideality,
abandon the character of symbolic architecture and the classical ideal
of sculpture, and therefore borrow their type from the romantic form
of art, whose mode of plasticity they are most adequately adapted to
express. And they constitute a _totality_ of arts, because the romantic
type is the most concrete in itself.[172]
i. The articulation of this _third sphere_ of the individual arts may
be determined as follows. The _first_ art in it, which comes next to
sculpture, is painting. It employs as a medium for its content and for
the plastic embodiment of that content visibility as such in as far as
it is specialized in its own nature, _i.e._ as developed into colour.
It is true that the material employed in architecture and sculpture is
also visible and coloured; but it is not, as in painting, visibility
as such, not the simple light which, differentiating itself in virtue
of its contrast with darkness, and in combination with the latter,
gives rise to colour.[173] This quality of visibility, made subjective
in itself and treated as ideal, needs neither, like architecture,
the abstractly mechanical attribute of mass as operative in the
properties of heavy matter, nor, like sculpture, the complete sensuous
attributes of space, even though concentrated into organic shapes.
The visibility and the rendering visible which belong to painting
have their differences in a more ideal form, in the several kinds of
colour, and they liberate art from the sensuous completeness in space
which attaches to material things, by restricting themselves to a plane
surface.
On the other hand, the content also attains the most comprehensive
specification. Whatever can find room in the human heart, as feeling,
idea, and purpose; whatever it is capable of shaping into act--all this
diversity of material is capable of entering into the varied content of
painting. The whole realm of particular existence, from the highest
embodiment of mind down to the most isolated object of nature, finds
a place here. For it is possible even for finite nature,[174] in its
particular scenes and phenomena, to make its appearance in the realm
of art, if only some allusion to an element of mind endows it with
affinity to thought and feeling.