The same principle generally differentiates the individual from his own bodily frame and external environment to quite as considerable an extent as it brings the soul into mediated relation with the same. Within the compass of this subjective differentiation--regarded as the independent assertion of human individuality as opposed to God, Nature, and the inward and external life of other persons, regarded also conversely as the most intimate relation, the most secure communion of God with the community, and of individual men with God, the environment of Nature and the infinite variety of the wants, purposes, passions, and activities of human existence--falls the entire movement and vitality, which sculpture, both in respect to its content and its means of contributing expression, suffers to escape; and it adds an immeasurable wealth of new material and a novel breadth and variety of artistic treatment which hitherto was absent. Briefly, then, this principle of subjectivity is on the one hand the basis of division, on the other a principle of mediation and synthesis, so that painting unites in one and the same art what hitherto formed the subject-matter of two different arts, namely, the external environment, which architecture treated artistically, and the essentially spiritual form, which was elaborated by sculpture. Painting places its figures on the background of a Nature or an architectural environment, both of which are the products of its own invention in precisely the same sense, and is able to make this external material in both of these aspects by virtue of its emotional powers and soul a counterfeit within its ideal realm, in the degree that it understands how best to place it in relation and harmony with the spirit of the figures that live and move therein.
Such is the principle of the new advance that painting contributes to the representative powers of art.
If we inquire now the course which the more detailed examination of our subject necessitates the following division will serve us.
In the _first_ place we shall have yet further to consider the _general character_ which the art of painting must necessarily receive in accordance with its notion and relatively both to its specific content, the material that is made consonant with this content and finally the artistic treatment which is thereby involved.