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

Art as Rebirth 79the hand, through many years of study and practice, may befree and able to draw and to express well [disegnare e esprimerebene], whether with pen, stylus, charcoal, crayon, or someother means, whatever nature has created. In effect, whenthe intellect sends forth purified concepts and with judgment[quando l’intelletto manda fuori i concetti purgati e con giudizio],the hand that has practiced drawing for so many years isacquainted with the perfection and the excellence of the arts,and at the same time the knowledge of the artist [il saperedell’artefici]. 60Such a text could clearly give rise to a wide range of philologicaland theoretical commentary. Let’s content ourselves here with underscoringits simultaneously circular and contradictory structure. Circular,because Vasari presents the art of painting to us by proceedingfrom knowledge to knowledge and intellect to intellect, in short, fromdrawing as procedendo dall’intelletto to drawing conceived as sapere dell’artefici.Contradictory, because in the one case drawing is defined asthe universalizing derivation of judgment based on natural and sensiblethings (cava di molte cose un giudizio universale), while in the otherit is defined as the individuating expression of this same judgment:its specifically sensible and apparent expression (apparente espressione)mediated by manual work (espressa con le mani). In one case, then,drawing gives us a way to extricate ourselves from the sensible worldtoward the ‘‘purified concepts’’ (concetti purgati) of the understanding;in the other, it gives us a way to extricate ourselves from pure judgmentyet ‘‘express’’ it by means of ‘‘charcoal’’ and ‘‘crayon’’ . . .One can readily imagine Vasari haughtily defending his unstablephilosophical position, and invoking the authority of his own practicalexperience as a painter to reject the existence in painting of any suchdualism of the sensible and the intelligible. He might, in this hypothetical,have cut to the quick of a real problem. But he did not do this,being too worried about grounding his notion of drawing in the intellectualcategories of his time, too worried about hierarchies that hedid want to suppress, only to displace. So he came to terms with thecircularity and contradictions of his theses about drawing by elaborat-