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

Art as Rebirth 81this training, would be ‘‘capable of much drawing within [his] ownhead’’ (capace di molto disegno entro la testa tua). 63 The reader will haveunderstood: what was a material practice capable of occupying thepainter’s whole head in Cennini becomes in Vasari an ideal conceptthat takes shape in the intellect to invest sensibly, under an apparenteespressione, the subjectile* of the painter. Vasari, a craftsman himself,never sought to obscure the technical meaning of disegno—as is apparenton every page that he devoted to the work of his peers. But hereversed the order of inference, proceeding from the subject to thesubjectile and not from the subjectile to the subject, subsuming drawingas practice into drawing as concept . . . never saying clearly where,when, and why he did so. So we no longer know whether Vasari,when it comes to disegno, is talking to us about the graphic sign orabout the idea; we no longer know whether he is talking about asignifier or a signified, or about something else entirely. We senseonly the advent, in the discourse of art, of the equivocations of an oldmagical idealism.What’s in question, more fundamentally, is the ancient magiccalled mimesis. In effect, Vasari’s disgeno tallies precisely with the semanticextension of imitation and is tantamount to a specified or instrumentalterm for it. If the mother-goddess were to have a favoriteattribute or emblem, it would be a stylus that knows how to draw.Nothing good can be accomplished in the arts, writes Vasari, unless itcomes ‘‘from continual practice in copying natural objects, and fromthe study of pictures by excellent masters and of ancient statues.’’ 64And all of his critical discussions about the use of color, the renderingof light, and the important criterion of unione are, at one point oranother, referenced to the sovereign paradigm of disegno. 65 For it isindeed as a sovereign paradigm that drawing would, for quite sometime, reign in minds: it would confer upon all these practices withcrushed pigments, rough-hewn blocks, and masonry walls the prestigeof the Idea. Idea-as-principle and Idea-as-end: this was already beingsaid when Vasari was writing his book. 66 It would be said again in the*A term coined and expounded in Didi-Huberman, La Peinture incarnée (1985); roughly,what the painter ‘‘throws’’ or projects onto the support.