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Abstract

Hegel’s aesthetics is not only organized around a developed account of the differing artistic genres (from architecture to poetry) but also articulates the importance of the particular forms of art (i.e., the symbolic, classical and romantic). The oppositions involved in Hegel’s treatment of the particular forms of art – particularly that between the symbolic and the classical – also have an importance for the twentieth-century art historian E. H. Gombrich, who frames their relation as an opposition between what he called the “incarnational” side of art and the “challenge to the senses” that he thought the symbolic art form posed. This paper compares Gombrich’s and Hegel’s views of these art forms and turns in a final section to an exploration of the post- Hegelian, post-Gombrichian legacy of these issues.