Music is, Weisse says, a temporal art - unless dressed with visible things, like in opera, there is nothing stable in a piece of music, only ceaseless movement from one note to another. In other words, music is like an activity without any product, creation as doing without creation as what has been done. Weisse notes that if creative activity is to be really creative, art must produce also these stable products. This means moving from temporal to spatial, that is, from tones to visible shapes, from music to plastic arts.
Just like the first type of music meant control over artificially produced tones, forcing measures or melodies on them, the first type of plastic art, Weisse continues, should be control over matter without any intervention of natural shapes that should be imitated, forcing the very will of the artist on matter. We might think that Weisse is here speaking of abstract art, but this wasn’t yet a thing in Weisse’s time. Instead, he is referring to architecture, which he also takes to be the historically first plastic art.
All art involves for Weisse a delimitation of something irrational by a rational measure, just like melodies were structured by rhythm and harmony. Interestingly, Weisse is from now on quite silent about the irrational, which he also calls the proper beauty, but he does keep indicating analogues to rhythm - the more mechanic repetition of sounds - and harmony - the more complex weaving of seeming variations and even destructions of melody into a rational whole.
What corresponds to rhythm in architecture, Weisse says, is the law of symmetry, that is, repetition of certain spatial relations of constructed matter into different directions. This otherwise on-going construction of matter is then limited in Weisse’s idea by the analogue of harmony or the law of statics.This law, Weisse states, is meant to enclose the construction in certain limits and exclude the outside from the inside. The law of statics should incorporate all mathematical rules explaining how the smallest amount of matter can be used to inscribe the greatest amount of space.
Weisse compares the construct of architecture with the visible nature, which is a dwelling for humans - it is a place where we are absorbed into the universal essence of humanity in dreaming, but which provides a stage for our actions during the time we are awake. The constructs of architecture, Weisse suggests, should then be, first and foremost, dwellings for the divine: temples, churches and other holy places. Of course, architects do also plan buildings for more mundane life, but dwellings for the divine still hold a priority in Weisse’s eyes. These dwellings should not just facilitate religious activities, but also embody their spirit in their style. This means, Weisse explains, that different cultures with their different ideals have their own type of architecture - ancient architecture differs from romantic or gothic architecture, while aspects of both are combined in the modern architecture.
A construct of architecture is in a sense an appearance of human personality in a visible shape. This is still not yet explicit in buildings as such, but it can be made more explicit through various decorations picturing plants, animals and humans. Even more explicit than these transitional shapes of art is the very art that distinguished the shape of an individual from their environment, whether it be natural or a construct of architecture. We are of course speaking of sculpture.
Just like with architecture, Weisse again suggests two laws providing rationality to statues. First of these - the regulated creation - is here provided by the canon or proportion describing the relations between members of a human body. The second law, which should gather the creations into a unity, is provided in sculpture by the very human form, which sculpture attempts to describe.
Moving from architecture to sculpture means moving to a more concrete element. At the same time as we are moving to a more realist form of art, we are still not finished with the more mental side of human life. Indeed, Weisse notes, although human shaped, statues often represent gods. This links sculpture immediately to ancient ideal with its polytheistic mythology: a statue is like an individual representing universal sagas. True, sculpture can be applied to mere human personalities, Weisse admits, but the products of this artistic process are more often not complete statues, but busts and similar incomplete shapes, which are already transitional stages toward two-dimensional paintings.
Painting, Weisse says, provides a mediating point between architecture and sculpture. The idea is that while architecture creates unified environments and sculpture individuals separated from their environments, a painting can show both a unified environment and individuals within it. What is also new in painting is that the whole materiality of plastic art is reduced to a mere play of colours. Indeed, Weisse suggests that image produced by colours is the essence of material objects, since colours are the first thing we humans experience through vision.
Painting presupposes, Weisse says, all of the visible world. This does not mean that painting would pick beautiful individual objects to make a beautiful work of art. Instead, it weaves all individual objects into a beautiful whole. Thus, while sculpture was dedicated just to bringing about this notion of individuality, in painting these are just elements of something larger. Yet, because the individual objects still form a basis of a painting, a painter should remain true to the nature of these objects and follow laws concerning things like perspective and the use of light and shades. The individual objects as parts of a beautiful painting can even be beautiful, but this beauty is of different sort than beauty of statues, Weisse says. It is not a simple beauty of a body, but a beauty of an image expressing various connections to things inside and outside the painting
An important part in the beauty of a painting is its ability to express even motion and change, and indeed, all processes in nature and human life, as summarised in a single moment. Thus, it gives eternal stability to variability of finite life. This eternal, Weisse suggests, is the divine, which is not anymore represented by a single body, but by the non-visible link tying all the action of the painting into a whole. This divinity is expressed particularly in the so-called history painting, Weisse says, which is explicitly dedicated to expressing the mien of humans in great historical actions. Just like with sculpture, there is also a form of painting with more finite topic, that is, genre painting, dedicated to representing slices of life.
