Les vertus de l’imparfait

In front of both the classical perfection of the statue of the impassive god and the romantic dream of the dissolution of matter in the pure spirituality of music, Hegel’s analysis gives a significant role to two arts of the space: Architecture, which embodies the incapacity of art to give a home to the divine, and painting, which allows the flame of the spirit to shine fleetingly over the most evanescent aspects of material reality. By so doing, Hegel highlights a new paradigm of art: a perfection of the imperfect, as it were. But he carefully ensures that it does not become too perfect.