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

84 Confronting Imagesof all cognitive and sensible forms. (4) Internal model of allconcepts and all things produced by art. (5) Almost anotherdivinity, another productive nature, in which live the thingsproduced by art. (6) A burning spark of divinity within us.(7) Internal and external light of the intellect. (8) First internalmotive, principle, and end of our operations. (9) Nourishmentand life of all science and practice. (10) Increase of allvirtue and spur to glory, by which finally are brought to manall the benefits of art and human industry. 74The system seems complete, or at least constituted. Nothing islacking, not even a ‘‘spur to glory’’ and a return to courtly obediencefor the figurative arts. 75 But above all something is constituted, in themythic crucible of the Renaissance: it is the commonplace generallydesignated by the term Fine Arts, a term formulated at the precisemoment—along with its stakes and its consequences—when the discourseof the history of art was invented. At once a second religion, arhetoric of immortality, and the foundation of a knowledge, the historyof art constituted its object, art, in the same movement wherebyit constituted itself as a subject of discourse. A second religion inwhich the intelligible descended into the sensible and subsumed itthrough the magical operation of the disegno; a rhetoric of immortalityin which artists joined the demigods in the heaven of eterna fama;finally, the foundation of a knowledge, of this sapere dell’artefice thathad to be justified, made intelligible, intelligent, ‘‘liberal.’’ Thus thehistory of art created art in its own image—its specific and specifiedimage, triumphant and self-contained.