Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics

4. Beauty, the Ideal, and Representational Art

Chapter 4  Beauty, the Ideal, and Representational Art H egel discusses the individual arts in a manner typical of his contemporaries, arranging their treatment according to a hierarchy of dignity. Architecture, as the least representational, is first, while poetry, as the most intellectual, is last. In between lie sculpture, painting, and music—in that order. Moreover, each art is classified according to its essential nature within the historical art forms: he sees architecture as fundamentally symbolic, sculpture as classical, and the rest of the arts as romantic. This makes architecture explicitly the “foundation” of all the arts, revealing the essence of art itself, in spite of its nonrepresentational nature; this is because architecture gives shape to the objective world of nature (VÄ 2, 267; A 2, 631). Although the other visual arts rely on representation, architecture does not. Music and poetry are not representational in the same sense as the visual arts, but they are held to express something vital to the human spirit. Yet in what sense architecture could be the foundation of the rest of the arts becomes a mysterious assertion if its power lies not in its spiritual nature but in its capacity to present nature itself. To approach Hegel’s treatment of the individual arts as a potential source of enlightenment regarding the nature of art seems, therefore, fraught with difficulties. Perhaps for this very reason commentators tend to give only cursory consideration to the individual arts in Hegel’s aesthetics.1 Certainly given Hegel’s 83 insistence on the necessity of intelligible content in the arts, one of the representational arts would be a far more likely candidate to reveal the essence of art. It appears best to begin our examination of Hegel’s treatment of the individual arts with those arts that most clearly depend on the prior concept of the Ideal: sculpture and painting. How architecture functions as the foundation of all the arts is best left to the end of the discussion, once the essence of each art has been clarified. Although this order appears to violate the order in which Hegel builds up his discussion of the arts through the art forms, it is the easiest way to understand Hegel’s point in identifying architecture as the foundational art. Moreover, it makes it possible to see why Hegel appears not to rely on the Ideal in his discussion of this art in particular, and why it tends to disappear into the background in his treatment of music and poetry. Indeed, the striking characteristic about his discussion of the visual arts of sculpture and painting is that, in spite of the importance he attaches to the classical Ideal and the concept of ideal beauty in sculpture, ideal beauty disappears from his treatment of painting and the romantic Ideal becomes lost in the historical development of the art. Instead, they are replaced by the concept of “characteristic beauty,” but at the price of ignoring the long tradition of art theory emphasizing the role of ideal beauty in painting. Attention to the visual arts first takes us to the heart of Hegel’s aesthetics in a way clearly connected to the representational nature of those arts. It enables us to confront, at the outset, the issues posed by modernism’s denial of beauty and representation. Hegel’s account of sculpture and painting makes their place in historical development central. In his view, sculpture is a classical art; painting is a romantic one. They have not only different aims in the materials employed, but different principles in their representations of the Ideal characteristic of the different eras during which their cultivation captures the essence of the age. Taken together, the history of sculpture and painting offer a complete history of the Spirit from classical times down to Hegel’s own day. Shifts in the subject matter reveal the movement of the Spirit from the serene paganism of classical Greece to the Christian paradox of divine bliss in the midst of woe. But while Hegel does not offer any commentary on the development of abstraction, which is the central issue in the wake of modernism, he does point to the unfolding of the romantic spirit in the history of painting in a way that identifies the problem at the core of romantic 84 Between Transcendence and Historicism art. For the original romantic content of the mimetic art of painting, Christ and the saints, gradually...