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

108 Confronting Imagestions, these ends? And what about the playful yet urgent warning thatconcludes the same text: ‘‘If books were subject to the same laws andregulations as pharmaceutical products, the dust jacket of every copywould have to bear the label ‘Use with Care’—or as it used to say onold medicine containers: cavtivs.’’ 62 What is he warning us againsthere? What was dangerous about reading Idea?Let’s suggest the hypothesis—manifestly audacious, violent, interpretive—thatPanofsky momentarily saw his own book, Idea, as amagic ‘‘pharmakon,’’ as a potion of knowledge about art and aboutimages in general: a remedy for all uncertainties, in other words abrew of neo-Kantian synthesis; but also a brew of forgetfulness, thepoison of the ‘‘ideal’’ concept instilled into our gazes. Panofsky perhapsdreaded, in republishing in the field of the history of art this littlebook previously published as an extension of a philosophical lecturegiven by Ernst Cassirer—he perhaps dreaded that his ‘‘Idea,’’ an objectof critical and historical study, might be mistaken for a pure object ofaesthetic faith and an automatic philosophy for art historians. PerhapsPanofsky dreaded, in this moment when he was again reflecting onthe Renaissance, the delayed effects of his own philosophy, constructedor spontaneous.The question, ultimately, has as much to do with the notion ofIdea as with a choice that, little by little and even imperiously, settledon the great humanist period of the history of art. In 1924, Panofskyworked as much on Carolingian architecture and thirteenth-centurysculpture as on Dürer and the Italian Renaissance. 63 However, themovement specific to Idea already required that all the essentials of itsanalysis be rooted in the Renaissance: the introduction opposed at theoutset the doctrine of Plato—Idée oblige—to some lines written in thesixteenth century by Melanchthon; then three-fifths of the book aredevoted to the Quattrocento and the Cinquecento, leaving only fiftypages for all the rest: antiquity, the Middle Ages, and neoclassicism,which is to say for something like twenty-two centuries of history; apeculiarity of composition taken so far that the last word, after Bellori,after Winckelmann, is given to Michelangelo and Dürer. All of whichprompts suspicion that humanism was not simply a privileged objectof Panofskian knowledge, but even a requirement, a veritable theoret-