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History of Art, Reason 119explicated images, but also because it is read and used in the alphabeticalorder of a dictionary of words. Such is its first operation, its firstmagical synthesis: that of images for reading. Second, the Iconologiaformulated, beginning with its preface, the doctrine of a common traitbetween the visible and the invisible: for its object was none other than‘‘images made to signify something different from what the eyesees’’—something that was an abstract concept, the whole book drawingup a catalogue of them, like a museum of images for thinking. 92Now thinking has rules, they say, that discourse masters: through rhetoric,through dialectic. In a lapidary allusion to Ripa in 1966, Panofskyindicates immediately that his book was ‘‘intended not only for paintersand sculptors, but for orators, preachers, and poets.’’ 93 This meansthat the ‘‘common traits’’ envisaged by Cesare Ripa led to somethinglike ‘‘rules for the management of images’’—universal rules that needonly be sought in the exemplum of the ancients:Images made to signify something different from what isseen with the eye [le imagini fatte per signifare une diversa cosada quella che si vede con l’occhio] have no more certain or moreuniversal rule [non hanno altra più certa, ne più universale regole]than imitation of the monuments that are found inbooks, in medals, and in the marbles carved by the industryof the Latins and the Greeks, and of those still more ancientwho were the inventors of this art. 94There is here the principle of a rhetoric, where today the history ofart often still thinks it finds definitive motivations* for the image.There is also here the principle of a logic, one that engages in radicalfashion the question of being and name, of the name and the visible.Ripa tells us, in effect, about ‘‘the reasonings of images’’ (ragionamentid’imagini) and superposes the visible monstration of the figure abovethe denominative efficacy of its ‘‘declaration’’ (dichiarazione). Why?Because an image ‘‘made to signify something different from what isseen with the eye’’ does not have at its disposition a sensible appear-*des ressorts définitifs.