I present you some very interesting quotes from a book by the philosopher Hegel:

This book is devoted to aesthetics, that is to say, the philosophy, the science of beauty, specifically the fine arts, excluding the beautiful natural …. Artistic beauty is superior to natural beauty because it is a product of the mind. … The beautiful artistic holds its superiority because it involved the mind and therefore the truth.

The absolute mind is the union of itself and nature. Nature therefore exists only as an idea, as something put.

The artistic beauty is for meaning, feeling, intuition, imagination ….

Beauty can only be expressed in the form, because it alone is the outward manifestation by which objective idealism of the living being is offered to our intuition and our sensitive contemplation.

the abstract purity of the material, in form, color, sound, etc., is the essence […] The purity of the sky, the transparency of the air, lake shining like a mirror, still surface of the sea, we rejoice because of those same qualities. It is the same in the purity of sound. A pure voice, even though it still emits only simple sounds, already has something pleasant and attractive.

We find in particular that the man has always used art as a means to realize the ideas and the highest interests of his mind. The people filed their highest conceptions in productions of art have expressed them and realized by means of art.

Art, philosophical thought of object : 

Art and rational thought

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HEGEL

Born August 27, 1770 in Stuttgart and died November 14, 1831 in Berlin