[Footnote 212: I presume the Pietà in St. Peter's.]
[Footnote 213: Hegel's "Vermisch. Schriften," vol. II, p. 561.]
The source of the general transition from sculpture to the other arts is, as we have seen, the principle of _subjectivity_, which now invades art's content and its manner of exposition. What we understand here by subjectivity is the notion of an intelligence which ideally exists in free independence, withdrawing itself from objective reality into its own more intimate domain, a conscious life which no longer concentrates itself with its corporeal attachment in a unity which is without division.
There follows from this transition, therefore, that dissolution, that dismemberment of the unity which is held together in the substantive and objective presence of sculpture, in the focus of its tranquillity and all-inclusive rondure and as such is apprehended in fusion. We may consider this breach from two points of view. On the one hand sculpture, in respect to its _content_, entwined what is substantive in Spirit directly with the individuality, which is as yet not self-introspective, in the exclusive unit of a personal consciousness, and treated thereby an _objective_ unity in the sense in which objectivity suggests what is intrinsically infinite, immutable, true--that substantive aspect, in short, which has no part in mere caprice and singularity. And from another point of view sculpture failed to do more than discharge this spiritual content wholly within the corporeal frame as the vital and significant instrument of the same, and by doing so create a _new objective_ unity in _that_ meaning of the expression, under which objectivity, as contrasted with all that is wholly ideal and subjective, indicates real and external existence.
When we find, then, that these two aspects, at first thus reconciled in one another by sculpture, are separated, that which we call _self-introspective_ spirituality is not merely placed in opposition to that which is _external_, but also, in the domain of what is _spiritual_ throughout, what is substantive and objective in that medium, in so far as it no longer continues to be retained in what is substantial individuality simply, is dissevered from the vital particularity of the conscious life, and all these aspects which have been hitherto held together in perfect fusion are relatively to each other and independently free, so that they can be treated too by art as free in this very way.