The Introduction to Hegel's Philosophy of Fine Arts: Translated from the German with Notes and Prefatory Essay
Georg Hegel · en
5. Such we may take to be the articulated totality of the particular
arts, viz. the external art of architecture, the objective art of
sculpture, and the subjective art of painting music and poetry.
Many other classifications have been attempted, for a work of art
presents so many aspects, that, as has often been the case, first one
and then another is made the basis of classification. For instance,
one might take the sensuous medium. Thus architecture is treated as
crystallization; sculpture, as the organic modelling of the material in
its sensuous and spatial totality; painting, as the coloured surface
and line; while in music, space, as such, passes into the point of
time possessed of content within itself, until finally the external
medium is in poetry depressed into complete insignificance. Or, again,
these differences have been considered with reference to their purely
abstract attributes of space and time. Such abstract peculiarities of
works of art may, like their material medium, be consistently explored
in their characteristic traits; but they cannot be worked out as the
ultimate and fundamental law, because any such aspect itself derives
its origin from a higher principle, and must therefore be subordinate
thereto.
This higher principle we have found in the types of art--symbolic,
classical, and romantic--which are the universal stages or
elements[182] of the Idea of beauty itself. For _symbolic art_
attains its most adequate reality and most complete application in
_architecture_, in which it holds sway in the full import of its
notion, and is not yet degraded to be, as it were, the inorganic
nature dealt with by another art. The _classical_ type of art, on the
other hand, finds adequate realization in sculpture, while it treats
architecture only as furnishing an enclosure in which it is to operate,
and has not acquired the power of developing painting and music as
absolute[183] forms for its content. The _romantic_ type of art,
finally, takes possession of painting and music, and in like manner
of poetic representation, as substantive and unconditionally adequate
modes of utterance. Poetry, however, is conformable to all types of the
beautiful, and extends over them all, because the artistic imagination
is its proper medium, and imagination is essential to every product
that belongs to the beautiful, whatever its type may be.
And, therefore, what the particular arts realize in individual works
of art, are according to their abstract conception simply the universal
types which constitute the self-unfolding Idea of beauty. It is as the
external realization of this Idea that the wide Pantheon of art is
being erected, whose architect and builder is the spirit of beauty as
it awakens to self-knowledge, and to complete which the history of the
world will need its evolution of ages.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] New York, Appleton and Co.
[2] Chicago, Griggs and Co., 1885.
[3] Edinburgh, Oliver and Boyd, 1886.