  Hegel acknowledges that painting reached a degree of perfection in the classical world, but he maintains that it is best suited to the expression of romantic, Christian spirituality (and the secular freedom of post-Reformation modernity) (PKÄ, 181). This is because the absence of bodily solidity and the presence of color allow the more inward spirituality of the Christian world to manifest itself as such. If sculpture is the material embodiment of spirit, painting gives us, as it were, the face of spirit in which the soul within manifests itself as the soul within (PKÄ, 183).