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

78 Confronting Imagesarti del disegno. It was in the triumphal intoxication of this academicphenomenon that a painter like Giovanni Battista Paggi could envisagewarding off the risk of artistic decadence by forbidding the exerciseof painting to anyone not of noble blood. 59Beyond such extreme cases, of course isolated, the great thing remainedthis: the notion of disegno would make it possible to justifyartistic activity as ‘‘liberal,’’ and no longer artisanal, because the worddisegno was a word of the mind as much as a word of the hand.Disegno, then, served to constitute art as a field of intellectual knowledge.We must return, to comprehend the amplitude of such a program, tothe solemn and convoluted sentences that open the chapter devotedto painting, in the celebrated Introduzzione alle tre Arti del Disegno:Drawing, the father of our three arts, architecture, sculpture,and painting, proceeding from the intellect [procedendo dall’intelletto],derives from many things a universal judgment[cava di molte cose un giudizio universale]: as it were a form oridea of all the things in nature [simile a una forma overo ideadi tutte le cose della natura], which is exceedingly regular in itsproportions. Thus it is that drawing, not only in the bodiesof humans and animals but also in plants, buildings, sculptures,and paintings, recognizes the proportion of the wholeto its parts and of the parts to one another and to the whole[conosce la proporzione che ha il tutto con le parti, e che hanno leparti infra loro e col tutto insieme]. And since from this recognition[cognizione] there arises a certain concept and judgment[un certo concetto e giudizio] that forms in the mind the thingthat, later formed by the hand [poi espressa con le mani], iscalled a drawing, one may conclude that this drawing isnothing but a visual expression and clarification of the conceptthat was in the soul [una apparente espressione e dichiarazionedel concetto, che si ha nell’animo], imagined in the mindand fabricated in the idea [nella mente imaginato e fabbricatonell’idea] . . . However that may be, what drawing requires,when the invention derives from something in the judgment[quando cava l’invenzione d’una qualche cosa dal giudizio], is that