Andrei Rublev seemed to embark on a reversed trajectory of “Religion in the Form of Art” as Hegel delineated. For Hegel, the perfection and incommensurability, the indwelling god of art consist in the depersonalization and evacuation of the artist’s particularity, thereby rising to the abstraction of pure form/action/thought/inwardness with true self-consciousness, through which Spirit gain a universal representation of itself. As an icon painter, Rublev initially stood on the bridge of symbolism—one side was the “figura”, the lifelike images derived from Bible stories, and the other was the “Notion”, transcendent meanings abstracted from concreteness. The art of icon, kindled by Cult/ecstasy of “immediate” apocalypse and thoughtful religious categories at the same time, itself closes to Hegel’s delineation except for the lack of freedom. Rublev, conversely, turned back to the empirical deluge of the world that burst the insular bridge of symbolism, and enquired the usefulness and value of art, of religion further. In Hegel’s words, it was the time that Spirit had transcended his previous artist representation and called for something new. Rublev couldn’t elevate himself to the accordance with Spirit immediately, thus sealing his paintbrush-- actually sealing himself, apart from an impotent pair of eyes to observe people’s catastrophes and sufferings. Nevertheless, not through Notion, but through the tasting the world of Being, where the vigorousness of land and labor, the creative power of people (or rather the “slave”, relative to regnant “master”) and the miracle of bell-making reconsolidated the positivity of existence and belief, did he resurrected his impulse and inspiration of art. However, a realistic painter is not what he could transform to. The last paintings of Rublev, as the epilogue of the movie, to some extent already rose to the abstraction of Notion from Being. Whereas, without exposure of self-experiences and disaster as it were, the last paintings still gave a lot of hints about the shock and metaphor of disaster and the teleological sublimation of religion by the cinema stress of the paintings’ unique radiance, traces of torture and Christ’s redemption, which detached again from Hegel’s statement of “pure form”. Opposed to the above, I want to mention Godard’s Passion, in which the recomposition of the European masterpieces of paintings and free appearance of the anti-plot images probably has more reverberation of Hegel.
