The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 3 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
unimpaired inwardness, a look that is shut off from external objects,
and retires on the essential presence of individuality, whose depths
are suffused over the entire presentment. In the case of coins, too, of
the best period the eyes are deep-set, and the enclosing bones of the
eye are projected. The eyebrows on the contrary are not expressed by
a more extended arch of tiny hairs, but merely suggested by means of
the acute sharpness of the eye-bone ridge, which, without interrupting
the forehead in its form of continuity as eyebrows actually do through
their colour and relative elevation, surround the eyes as with an
elliptical garland. The more elevated and consequently more independent
arch of the eye-brows has never been regarded as beautiful.
Winckelmann[162] further observes with regard to the _ears_ that the
ancients devoted the greatest care to their elaboration, so that in the
case of cut stones indifferent attention to the execution of the ear
is an infallible sign of the spuriousness of the work in question. In
particular he insists that statues which are portraits often reproduced
the characteristic and individual type of the ear. It is consequently
possible in many cases to ascertain the very personality represented
from the ear, if the same happens to be known, and to take one example,
from a single ear with an exceptionally large opening into it, to
deduce the presence of a Marcus Aurelius. Indeed, the ancients have
not failed to indicate in this respect what is actually misshapen.
As examples of a peculiar type of ear to be found in ideal heads,
Winckelmann draws attention to certain ears given to Hercules, which
are beaten out flat, and others which bulge out in their cartilaginous
folds. They indicate wrestlers and pancratiasts, just as Hercules
himself carried off the prize at Elis as a pancratiast in the games of
Pelops.