The Frame Exists Solely for the Content

Have you ever noticed the frame on a photograph or painting? I have been studying the "founding fathers" of art history, and I have come across G.F.W. Hegel from the late Nineteenth Century. While his predecessor Vasari judged artwork by its physical appearance and level of quality, Hegel believed that the truth of an artwork existed within the idea behind it. Hegel wrote of both the concept/spirit of an artwork and it's physical form. He found that the truest artforms were a product of an idea and its physical form conformed into one. He emphasized the spirit and the inner life. According to Hegel, "Works of art are all the more excellent in expressing true beauty, the deeper is the inner truth of their content and thought." He sees that art, "this sensuous concrete thing, which bears the stamp of an essentially spiritual content, is also essentially for our inner apprehension; the external shape, whereby the content is made visible and imaginable, has the purpose of existing solely for our mind and spirit." I completely agree with Hegel. I have also studied Giorgio Vasari his predecessor. Vasari was from Florence and developed his ideas under a Florentine influence of regarding art as a supreme form. Vasari saw Michelangelo's art as reaching the perfection of art. His passion for art was in the superficial. But Hegel's passion was in the idea behind the artwork. The painting is the mere structure that holds it all together (like a picture frame). The Idea/the Spirit is the heart of it. I think this also applies to people. We are all bodies, skeletal frames that hold so much more. I like Vasari and I like Hegel, mainly because they both thought it important to document and study art and its movement. I hope to do the same.