Art

Abstract

Abstract Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art offer a veritable ‘world history of art’, and have led to his being called the real ‘father of art history’, but at their heart is a close identification of beauty with ‘the ideal’ and of art with ‘the classical’—and hence with (Greek) antiquity. With reference to the legacies of Winckelmann and Kantian aesthetic theory, this chapter begins by explicating the main features of Hegel’s aesthetics: the notion of ‘the ideal’ and of art’s vocation to reveal ‘the truth’ sensuously; the classification of artistic styles into Symbolic, Classical, and Romantic; and the division of basic art forms into architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry. The chapter tackles each of these art forms in turn, focusing on Hegel’s sources and understanding of their role in Greek and Roman civilizations. His discussions of the Greek temple, Greek sculpture, epic, lyric, and comedy are relatively neglected, but all contribute as much as tragedy to his Winckelmannian understanding of the Greeks as ‘the people of art’ and of the ‘sculptural’ nature of the Greek mind. Here his Romans play counterpoint, as a derivative and aesthetically uncreative people—except in the genre of satire, which also fills out Hegel’s portrait of Roman ‘prose’, alienation, and increasing self-awareness. Though each of the art-forms peaks in a certain historical period, Hegel tends to associate each peak with the ‘classical’ ideal—an association that may help to illuminate his controversial statements about the ‘end of art’ in the modern, Romantic style.