Nicolai Hartmann’s (1882–1950) book Ästhetik (1953) has undergone the same fate as many other approaches to aesthetics developed during the first half of the last century in the German-speaking world. Like the aesthetic writings of Moritz Geiger, Alexius Meinong, Stephan Witasek, Roman Ingarden, Eugen Fink, Fritz Kaufmann, Oskar Becker, or Dietrich von Hildebrand, today Hartmann’s work on aesthetics is underappreciated and generally “unread”, as Kelly (2014, xxxii) has put it. Hartmann’s focus on beauty as the highest aesthetic value, his objectivism, his ontological approach to the arts, and the philosophical sources that inspired his work, did not sit easily with the aesthetics developed in the course of the last century.