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Art as Rebirth 75masters. Even if certain authors presented things under this aspect ofmutual incompatibility, it was not difficult for others to suggest thatthey were only two inflections of a single ideal. 51And ultimately, they were right. For everything proceeded fromidealism. Imitating beautiful nature, according to humanists of theCinquecento, was but another way of reviving the ideals of ancientart and thought; using perspective and playing with it con licenza wasbut another way of obtaining the outcome of the rhetoric of Ciceroand Quintilian; promoting the realist criterion in the order of the visiblewas but another way of ensuring the power of Ideas. In short, thetyranny of the visible and the tyranny of the Idea were but two sidesof the same coin. On the horizon of each of them was the trap ofabsolute seeing or knowledge, the trap of quiddity. It is not by chancethat Panofsky’s famous study of the history of artistic theory in theWest is entitled Idea; he showed there, in particular, how the ‘‘observationof nature’’ in the Renaissance had managed to be reshuffledwithout detriment into the ‘‘formation of ideas.’’ 52 So one might suggest,paradoxically, that realism (not in the medieval sense, of course,but in the aesthetic sense) constitutes the tone, the style, the rhetoricpar excellence of metaphysical idealism in the domain of the visualarts. Each helping the other to mend its faults. Each confirming theother in this great triumphalist mania for adæquatio, decorum,* andreflection.We should not be surprised here to see ‘‘artistic’’ realities expressedin terms of the philosophy of knowledge. The term Idea alone alreadylends itself to this, but there is more to it than that. When Vasari usedthe word, he himself clung to this subtle limit where the history ofart (in the subjective genitive sense of its practical value) empties intothe history of art henceforth conceived as an activity of knowledge.Idea provided the most general means of effecting such a transition:Vasari said that it was within the mind, but also ‘‘drawn from reality’’(cavata dalla realtà). 53 Later, Filippo Baldinucci defined the Idea, in hisfamous Vocabulario toscano dell’arte del disegno (1681), in accordancewith the double parameter of ‘‘perfect [intellectual] knowledge’’ andartistic invention:*convenance.