Hegel, Goethe e la bellezza dell’ombra. Vecchiaia, riscrittura, traduzione nelle lezioni di estetica

This paper investigates the meaning of the metaphor according to which artistic beauty is the beauty of the shadow. It asks whether the metaphorics of the shadow, in Hegel’s thought, may be taken literally enough to account not only for ideal art but also for art beyond the ideal. In order to address this question, the essay first analyzes Hegel’s engagement with Schiller and with the metaphor of beauty as a “realm of shadows,” through a close reading of the relevant passages in the edited Nach- und Mitschriften of the Lectures on Aesthetics. Secondly, it examines the role played by Goethe in the materials related to the Lectures. Goethe is repeatedly and emphatically invoked by Hegel as the artist who testifies to the vital survival of art in the epoch of its proclaimed “end.” Precisely for this reason, however, the themes of shadow and doubling prove helpful in clarifying Goethe’s recursive presence within the workshop of Hegelian aesthetics. In a first sense, Goethe appears as the figure whose genius fully emerges only in a second phase—an artistic maturity succeeding the impetuosity of youth. In a second sense, he is praised as the author of a rewriting: a second, modern Iphigenia in Tauris. Finally, Hegel lingers with particular appreciation on a work of singular and unprecedented genre, the West–Eastern Divan, which is also an act of poetic translation—an artwork that, like a shadow, draws its vitality precisely from being “twice.” The beauty of the shadow—understood as the structural doubling inherent in art—is thus connected to three intertwined problems: the end of art, the artist’s renewed vitality in maturity, and the logic of rewriting and translation as reiterations of an original.