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This history of truth—the unfolding of Spirit;is not formless or wandering; it is an evolution, or rather a hierarchized teleology, moving from primitive states to a modern (civilized, Christian, post-Antique, post-Oriental) state. For Hegel, the various arts reflect this chronological hierarchy in three great moments of what he termed the symbolic, the classical, and the romantic, as outlined in the reading below. This third stage of art's history was for Hegel in a very real sense the end of art: the dissolution and absorption of art into religion, into a spirituality (epitomized for Hegel by the Protestant Reformation of Christianity) in no need of material representations.
There are some questions to consider: is the modern discipline of art history, then, but a secularized version of a history of Spirit? Could such a discipline have existed which was not grounded in a vision of human history in which everything is poured into a single mould signifying the evolutionary triumph of Christianity over primitive versions of the Divine? Or, by extension, a history signifying the evolutionary triumph of European art, culture, and civilization over all others, which are thereby framed as Europe's anterior and prologue? These and related issues will be taken up in the following websites.