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

116 Confronting Imagessatanocracy as opposed to the medieval theocracy—not onlythe humanities but also the natural sciences, as we knowthem, will disappear, and nothing will be left but what servesthe dictates of the subhuman. But even this will not meanthe end of humanism. Prometheus could be bound and tortured,but the fire lit by his torch could not be extinguished.. . . The ideal aim of science would seem to be somethinglike mastery, that of the humanities something like wisdom.Marsilio Ficino wrote to the son of Poggio Bracciolini:‘‘History is necessary, not only to make life agreeable, butalso to endow it with a moral significance. What is mortal initself, achieves immortality through history; what is absentbecomes present; old things are rejuvenated; and young mensoon equal the maturity of old ones. If a man of seventy isconsidered wise because of his experience, how much wiserhe whose life fills a span of a thousand or three thousandyears! For indeed, a man may be said to have lived as manymillennia as are embraced by the span of his knowledge ofhistory.’’ 83In the arc* drawn between Kant’s remark nine days before hisdeath and Marsilio Ficino’s about immortality, then, the history of artinvented for itself a fundamental wisdom. It almost admitted—butwould ever be reluctant to admit this outright—that it is not a science,but at best something like an ancient sapience. ‘‘The history of art asa humanistic discipline’’ finds its end in accents prophetic rather thancognitive, incantatory rather than descriptive. We saw that the wordladen with all these aspirations, the word invoked in the last resort, wasnone other than the word ‘‘conscious’’: and in the end, consciousness isthe instrument on which Panofsky was counting to translate melancholy,or, more generally, anxiety about death (the death of art, ofmen, and of the ‘‘humanities,’’ already present in Vasari), into a positivevalue of knowledge, hope, and immortality (likewise already proposedby Vasari). So there is indeed here an ultimate resort to*arc, which can also mean ‘‘bow,’’ as in ‘‘bow and arrow.’’