The Jena Circle and Hegel: The Modernity of Painting, and the Return of the Classical

Abstract

This chapter begins with the paradigm-shift that took place in the last decade of the eighteenth century: the break with Winckelmann’s sculptural aesthetics, and the turn to painting, which is touted as the quintessentially ‘modern’ art. The important figures here are August and Friedrich Schlegel, and G.W.F. Hegel. In his 1799 dialogue The Paintings, August Schlegel dramatizes the shift to a new sensitivity. The drama opens with three friends who meet in a wing of Dresden’s Antikensammlung. Despite their admiration for ancient sculpture, the trio feels somewhat repulsed by it. In a symbolically freighted gesture, they exit the museum, and spend the rest of the day in a freewheeling discussion of various paintings. I then move to Friedrich Schlegel’s Descriptions of Paintings (1802–5). Here, taking to heart Wackenroder’s turn to Christian painting, and in opposition to Weimar classicism, Friedrich Schlegel develops an aesthetics of “angular, even skinny figures.” Gorgeousness of ekphrastic prose aside, what makes the Descriptions so compelling is their willingness to explore the time-bending cross-pollination between classical form and Christian motifs (in Raphael, Andrea Del Sarto, Correggio). Schlegel offers incisive remarks both about the potentials and the limits of such hybridization. The final section of this chapter is devoted to a highly succinct discussion of Hegel’s aesthetics of Christian painting. In many ways, Hegel simply deepens and gives philosophical clarity to insights which were at work in Schlegel. Even more than his (incidentally, much-detested) predecessor, Hegel is fascinated by a beauty that is temporally plural. In the Madonnas of Raphael, Perugino, and Correggio, Hegel sees a palingenesis-cum-metamorphosis of the classical line of grace. In another sense, however, Hegel denies to classical beauty the power to speak across the sands of time. For Hegel, classical beauty has become largely a matter of aesthetic delight and of historical insight. Furthermore, Hegel declares that with Christian Art (Crucifixions, martyrdoms), the ugly has become a recognized denizen of the philosophy of art. Two claims, thus, are at stake: the definitive pastness of classical beauty, and the new, positive role of deformed corporeality. With these two themes, the parable of FTA (and my narrative thereof) comes to a conclusion.