georges didi huberman, confronti... - lensbased.net

76 Confronting ImagesIdea, f. Perfect knowledge of the intelligible object [perfettacognizione del’obbietto intelligibile], acquired and confirmed bydoctrine and by usage.—Our artists [i nostri artefici] use thisword when they want to speak of a work as highly originaland inventive [opera de bel capriccio, e d’invenzione]. 54We must take these definitions seriously and, rather than isolatingtheir various levels, try to understand the transition, the displacementthat they effect. The history of art was born with such displacements.Even now it often continues to practice them. Its common currencywould be, then, this metaphysical coinage that, tossed into the air,glistens with a hundred lights but never tells us who is in charge, theIdea or the visible, each side speaking for the other. Vasari neverclearly answered the question: ‘‘What does one imitate with?’’ Whenhe answers: ‘‘With the eye,’’ the eye takes its legitimacy from theIdea. When he answers: ‘‘With the mind,’’ the mind takes its legitimacyfrom the visible. This relation of double legitimacy is a metaphysicalrelation. It, too, has its magic word, a ‘‘technical’’ wordcapable of handling all conversions, all transitions: it is the word disegno.*Disegno, in Vasari, serves first to constitute art as a single object, as awholly independent subject for which it provides, so to speak, theprinciple of a symbolic identification. ‘‘Not having it, one has nothing,’’writes Vasari; and he specifies, in the opening of his great Introduzzionealle tre arti del disegno, that design is the ‘‘father to our threearts—architecture, sculpture, and painting’’: in other words, the principleof their unity, their strictly generic principle. 55 It is what informsand fertilizes the mother-goddess—imitation—so as to give life to thethree enthroned goddesses presiding over the prints in the Lives likethree Fates spinning the destiny of a reunified art ...There was ofcourse no lack, before Vasari, of texts underscoring the fundamentalvalue of disegno. 56 But no one before him had affirmed with so much*The quandary of whether to translate disegno (and dessin) as ‘‘drawing’’ or as ‘‘design’’exemplifies the tension described here.