Символическая сущность искусства в романтической эстетике Фридриха Шлегеля

Abstract

According to Friedrich Schlegel, one of the leading theorists of German Romanticism, the “highest” art is always symbolic, and it would be more precise to name the discipline that deals with it “symbolics”, rather than “aesthetics”. According to Schlegel, the highest arts comprise painting, sculpture, music, and poetry as the “arts of the beautiful and the ideally significant”. Using the examples of painting and literary arts, he demonstrates the symbolic character of art in general. Schlegel thinks that masterpieces of old Italian and German painters exemplify symbolic art. Schlegel is against separating painting into genres. He thinks that portrait, landscape, or still nature are merely sketches in preparation for a large, multi-figure, historical painting — as a rule, with Christian content — which leads the spectator to divine spheres. At the same time, painting must perform its symbolic function by means purely pictorial. The best examples of poetry (this is how Schlegel styles all belles lettres) also have been symbolic, especially during its “Romantic period”, from the Middle Ages and up to the 1600s. Schlegel refers to its symbolic meaning by the term “allegory”. The Bible — as an artistic, symbolic book — became the foundation of the “Romantic” literature of the Middle Ages, which took two routes: “Christian-allegorical”, which transfers Christian symbolism on to the entire world and life, and properly speaking Romantic, which presents every phenomenon of life as leading up to symbolic beauty. Using the example of drama, Schlegel divides works of art into three categories: superficial, spiritual-profound, and eschatological. According to the German philosopher, contemporary art has lost its symbolic content and mostly remains at the superficial level.