The Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles (c.350 BC)
Hegel's approach to art is, ironically, much more evidence-laden than most efforts in analytic philosophical aesthetics today, which claim to take their cue from scientific method and empiricism. It’s simply the case that to study an artwork is to study a communication from a person or group of persons who embody a particular form of life, defined by a whole history, society, and culture. The artwork drives the historian simultaneously into the tiniest details of the marble or canvas and into the vast history of an entire period. This is part of why art history is both historicist and holistic. The close empirical moment of art historical investigation is governed by the larger systems of which the work is an expression.
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