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

88 Confronting Imagesplicit content. For it is the implicit movement of a simple reason (notso simple in fact, but maintained spontaneously) that I henceforthpropose to interrogate.It is well-known that Vasari’s Lives was immensely successful uponpublication. This success was not merely fashionable or circumstantial.It was a structural point of transformation, the durable implementationof a type of discourse whose basic premises would bequestioned by no one until the eighteenth century, in Spain, Germany,or even Holland. The famous ‘‘antithesis’’ of Italy and the LowCountries, analyzed by Panofsky, 3 exists perhaps in art, in the historyof art in the subjective genitive sense; it does not exist in the history ofart understood in the ‘‘objective’’ sense of discourse about art. Vasariinspired Carel van Mander as well as Francisco Pacheco and Joachimvon Sandrart. 4 Even when eighteenth-century French academic circlescriticized the narrative component of Vasari’s history, this was not inorder to radicalize a normative conception straight out of the Introduzzionealle tre Arti del Disegno and the humanist conception of art ingeneral: a conception wherein Mimesis walked hand-in-hand with Idea,wherein the tyranny of the visible—the tyranny of resemblance andof congruent appearance—had managed to express itself perfectly inthe abstract terms of an ideational truth or an ideal truth, of a disegnointerno of Truth or of an ideal of Beauty ...all of which ultimatelycomes back to the same thing, namely Sameness as shared metaphysicalauthority. 5Such a continuity, such a shared meaning is found again, for example,in the famous little book by Charles Batteux, published in 1747and entitled Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe—the latter’sbeing quite clearly enunciated under the authority of imitation, as itwas read, too, in all of Vasari’s proemii. 6 But where Vasari proclaimed,in a tone of practical enthusiasm as much as of shared certainty: ‘‘Yes,our art is all imitation,’’ Batteux went farther, on the authority ofAristotle, with regard to the absolute universality of the principle inquestion. Where Vasari, in response to the question ‘‘What to imitate?’’proposed the two parameters of nature and antiquity, Batteux repeatedthe refrain of nature exactly and transformed the ancient song