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110 Confronting Imagesulty of representation’’ (Vorstellungsvermögen). 65 Here we are close toGiordano Bruno, and before long Panofsky indeed invokes his ‘‘almostKantian statement according to which only the artist creates[the] rules’’ of his art, just as representations are deduced from theirown faculty in the human soul. 66 We gradually realize that Vasari hasbeen presented to us less as the hero of a rinascità of the history of art(which he absolutely is), than as the hero of a rinascità of the philosophyof knowledge (which he perhaps really isn’t). For Panofsky sawin the Lives that crucial moment when ‘‘the ‘subject-object problem’was now ripe for a basic clarification’’—which is what we usuallylearn in philosophy class about Kant. 67In some sense, then, there would be two ways of reading Vasari.The first would be to situate his work within what Panofsky calls the‘‘dialectical antinomy’’ (dialektische Antinomie) of idealism versus artisticnaturalisms—an antinomy that becomes confused with the historyof art itself, or rather with the history of artistic theory, and has ‘‘retainedits place in the twentieth [century].’’ 68 The other way, suggestedeven more strongly by a reading of Idea, would be to see inVasari a precursor of the syntheses established by Kant in philosophyand by Riegl in the history of art: although he did not provide a close‘‘philosophic analysis’’ of its intuitions, Vasari here becomes the firstthinker about art to have questioned the reality of the ‘‘thing in itself.’’Insofar as, according to Panofsky, the term ‘‘Idea’’ designates ‘‘everynotion that, conceived in the artist’s mind, precedes the actual depiction’’;insofar as this ‘‘functional’’ notion effects an intimate reconciliationbetween disegno and the concept, between art and knowledge;insofar, finally, as Vasari becomes a man of ‘‘abstraction’’ (Abzug) and‘‘intuitive synthesis’’ (intuitiver Synthesis) as opposed to Alberti’s ‘‘discursivesynthesis,’’ 69 we are led to believe that the Lives written by thefirst art historian fulfilled in advance what is carried out in the veryconclusion of Panofsky’s book and his great neo-Kantian disegno:In the theory of knowledge, the presupposition of this ‘‘thingin itself’’ was profoundly shaken by Kant; in art theory, apath to the same insight was first cleared by the efforts ofAloïs Riegl. We believe we have recognized that artistic per-