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

120 Confronting Imagesance that it can imitate directly. So it will imitate ‘‘reasonings,’’ intelligible‘‘declarations’’; it will follow term-for-term the discourse thatdefined this ‘‘thing,’’ this idea. In short, what is ultimately at stake inRipa’s iconology is that ‘‘this kind of image reduce easily to similitudewith the definition’’ (questa sorte d’imagine si riduce facilmente alla similitudinedella definitione), to the point of trying to make every detail ofthe visible representation correspond to a sequential verbal definition.95 Thus the whole iconological edifice rested on two axiomatichypotheses, hypotheses as ‘‘classical’’ as they are groundless: the firstrequiring that the name designate and describe the being, the secondthat the name itself make this visible. 96A common trait between the visible and the legible, between thevisible and the invisible, a possible congruence of sensible image andintelligible definition: one understands all the hopes that a history ofart desirous of grounding itself in reason might place in the iconologyissuing from Ripa. This made it possible to envisage humanist art withthe ‘‘eye’’ of a humanist—and furthermore made this possible, withoutcontradiction, with the still more discerning ‘‘eye’’ of a neo-Kantianscholar. The ‘‘artistic language’’ (Kunstsprache) discussed byWölfflin had finally denaturalized itself, in order to devote itself completelyto a ‘‘universal language’’ of images and culture, even a generativegrammar induced from the Ideas of reason. The passage fromiconography to iconology, here again, did not content itself with alteringmethodological givens; it altered object and method together. Itpresupposed an object adequate to the method, in other words an artthat was not just ‘‘iconographical’’—an art that made do with imitatingvisible, describable phenomena—but was also ‘‘iconological,’’which is to say an art that would also imitate noumena, intelligibleconcepts, subsuming and giving reason to the phenomena themselves.*Now this is indeed what Panofsky’s definition of the iconologicalcontent of artworks tends toward. It aims first to reveal whatever,in an image, belongs to the sphere of signification—which, all thingsconsidered, is not altogether self-evident: for where, in this sphere, is*Donnant raison aux phénomènes eux-mêmes, wordplay on the French idiomatic expressionsavoir raison, ‘‘to be right,’’ and donner raison à quelqu’un, ‘‘to admit that someone isright.’’