The Philosophy of Fine Art, volume 3 (of 4): Hegel's Aesthetik
Georg Hegel · en
is the unessential, which refuses wholly to fuse with the spiritual
realm of celestial Love, receives a more emphatic definition. In
other words, agreeably to the romantic type of art, it is free, and
is written in character all the more distinct in proportion as it
refuses to accept as its supreme principle classical beauty, that is
the entire transfusion of immediate vitality, and the particularity of
finite existence, with a spiritual or religious content. In despite of
this fact, however, there is no absolute reason that this individual
characterization should impair this inward intensity of Love, which,
as such on its own account, is not shackled to such features, but has
become free, and constitutes independently the truly self-substantive
Ideal of Spirit.
What, then, constitutes the ideal centre and main content of the
religious field is, as we have already indicated in our examination of
the romantic type of art, the essentially _reconciled_ and satisfied
Love, whose object should appear in the art of painting, whose function
it is to exhibit the most spiritual content under the mode of human
and corporeal actuality, as no mere "beyond" of Spirit, but in its
veritable presence. In conformity with such a result we may adduce the
Holy Family, and above all the love of the Madonna to her child as the
ideal content pre-eminently fitted to this sphere. On either side of
this centre, however, a mass of additional material extends which is
in varying degree less adapted in this sense to the art in question.
I will now attempt to differentiate the whole of this material on the
following lines.