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

Art as Rebirth 77force and solemnity that design might constitute the common denominatorof everything that we call ‘‘art.’’ So Vasari’s operation was tantamountto an act of baptism: henceforth, one no longer said ‘‘thearts’’ but ‘‘the arts of drawing.’’ An operation laden with consequences,as should be clear, for it would determine the whole visionof history in Vasari—and, consequently, the whole unity of what thehistory of art still calls ‘‘the fine arts’’ (les beaux-arts). 57It would be artificial to isolate the notion of disegno purely andsimply within the frame of academic debates about drawing theenemy of color, or about the supposed preeminence of one of thethree ‘‘major arts’’ over the two others. Today the word academic isused adjectivally and pejoratively, but we must not forget the profoundsocial reality of the academies of art in the Cinquecento,wherein these debates, the paragoni, had only an effect value (even ifthe effect always had consequences). Since it offered itself as commondenominator of the three ‘‘arts of drawing,’’ disegno indeed figuredprominently in such debates as a possible criterion of differentiation.But before that, and more fundamentally, it had served to constituteart as a noble practice, one that was coherent, intellectual, and ‘‘liberal’’—inother words, capable of liberating mind from matter—aswell as, finally, specific and ‘‘disinterested.’’ The Accademia del Disegno,founded in Florence in 1563 on the model of the literary academydirected by Benedetto Varchi, can be considered the work of Vasarialone. 58 It was not the only one, for some 2,200 academies were createdin Italy between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; but it wasdoubtless the most famous. It makes a pair with the great enterpriseof the Lives. It opens definitively the age of the fine arts, in otherwords the age of the ‘‘principal’’ arts—architecture, sculpture, painting—consideredin their social unity and in their shared character asliberal arts.But the unity of art did not come about without a split, just as thehistorical immortality of art did not come about without the death ofsomething else. Vasari killed the Middle Ages the better to immortalizethe Renaissance; he also sanctioned the split between the majorarts and the minor arts—in other words, he invented or reinvented thedistinction between art and craft—to save the aristocracy of the three