Hegel on Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece

From the Altarpiece, aka, (Adoration of the Mystic Lamb) at Ghent (1432) by Jan van Eyck (1390-1441)

Hegel took the central of these three figures, seated between Mary and John the Baptist, to be a representation of God the Father in the form of Jesus the Son.

In his Aesthetics III. 1.2.(α)(αa), T. M. Knox translation (1975), he wrote:

The first topic is the object of love itself in its simple universality and undisturbed unity with itself—i.e. God in his essence, devoid of any appearance, i.e. God the Father. Here, where painting intends to present God the Father as he is conceived in Christian ideas, it has great difficulties to surmount. The father of gods and men as a particular individual is exhaustively represented in art in the figure of Zeus. Whereas what God the Father lacks at once in Christianity is the human individuality in which alone art can reproduce the spirit. For, taken in himself, God the Father is certainly spiritual personality, supreme power, wisdom, etc., but he is always kept shapeless and as an abstract ens rationis. But art cannot renounce anthropomorphism and must therefore give him a human shape. Now, however universal this shape may be, however lofty, profound, and powerful it may be kept, nevertheless what emerges from it is only a masculine, more or less serious, individual who cannot completely correspond with our idea of God the Father. Amongst the older Dutch painters van Eyck has achieved the summit of excellence possible in this sphere in his presentation of God the Father in the altar picture at Ghent. This is a work which can be set beside the Olympian Zeus. Nevertheless, however perfect it may be in its expression of eternal peace, sublimity, power, and dignity, etc.—and in conception and execution its depth and grandeur are unsurpassable—it still has in it something unsatisfying according to our ideas. For God the Father is presented here as at the same time a human individual, and this can only be Christ the Son. In him alone have we a vision of this factor of individuality and humanity as a factor in the Divine, and we see it in such a way that it is not a naive imaginative shape, as in the case of the Greek gods, but proves to be an essential revelation, as what is most important and significant.

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