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

82 Confronting Imageswake of the Lives and of the Accademie del Disegno, in whole treatisesas in more concise formulations:Disegno, masculine noun. Expressed form of all intelligibleand sensible forms, that gives light to the mind and life topractical operations. 67Where are we, then, at the end of this long Vasarian excursus? We areat the point where the discourse about art seems to have succeeded innaming the vital principle of its object, by using the philosophical conceptsof the intellect and of the form or Idea—magically made instrumentalby the term disegno. We are, then, at the point where art, inthe discourse of its history, seems to have acknowledged its true intent*and formulated its true destiny through the terms of a philosophyof knowledge. But in the meantime something strange happened,perhaps due to the fact that famous artists, gathered in academies,themselves elaborated this new field that would be called the historyof art: namely, a recuperation of the object by the subject and of thesubject by the object. The discipline sought to arrogate to itself theprestige of its object of study; by grounding it intellectually, it soughtto regulate it. As for the knowledge about art whose field it opened up,it resolved henceforth to envisage or accept only an art conceived asknowledge: as reconciliation of the visible and the Idea, denial of itsvisual powers, and subjection to the tyranny of disegno. Art was acknowledgedless as a thinking object—which it had always been—than as an object of knowledge, all genitive senses conflated.A striking and almost excessive symptom of this movement is legiblein a text published forty years after the Giuntina edition of Vasari’sLives. It was written by Federico Zuccari, brother of the painter Taddeo,under the influence, explicitly avowed, of the Accademia del Disegnoin Rome. 68 Far from adopting the prudent position of a Paoletti,who, in his definition of the image, had opposed a concetto interno toits sensible realization, the disegno esterno, 69 Zuccari radicalized thesovereignty of disegno itself by deploying a whole theoretical arsenal*dessein.