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

174 Confronting Imagessingularly complicated his synthetic vision of Melancholia I, of Dürer,and perhaps even of the Renaissance generally.The astonishing thing and the symptomatic fact stem, more precisely,from this: on the one hand, Panofsky scrutinized with peerlessprecision the iconography of melancholy (so as to offer us the greatclassical summa that is the Saturn book) and discovered the value asself-portraiture that such an iconography could take on for Dürer; onthe other hand, his study of the artist of Nüremberg led him to castinto relief the formidable connection of Dürer’s self-portraits with theiconography of the Man of Sorrows, also known as the ‘‘DerelictChrist’’ (a word understood here in the broad sense). 83 Why didn’t hesecure the complementary connection between melancholy and theMan of Sorrows, thereby intensifying his interpretation of Dürer’swork? Why did he never talk about Christology when discussing melancholy,and never about melancholy when discussing the Man ofSorrows—when the very illustrations of his books carry the trace ofsuch a connection? 84 Clarification of the neo-Kantian premises of iconology,their vocation to ‘‘synthetic unity,’’ makes it possible for usto answer as follows: the introduction of such a transverse connection—abearer of over-determination, and thus susceptible of admittingequivocal, even antithetical meanings—would have complicated,and doubtless partly ruined, the clarity of the deductive model thatPanofsky ardently wished for. It would have complicated the idea,making for a melancholy that was diabolical in one sense and divinein another, feminine in one sense and masculine in another, pagan orSaturnian in one sense and Christian, even Christlike in another, etc.It would have complicated the idea, making for a Dürer who wasgrappling with art, science, and religion—a problem not broached byPanofsky in all its complexity. Finally, it would have complicated thehistorical schema that constituted the framework for the whole interpretation,introducing an element out of sync* with history—the autoteleologicalhistory of humanist art—something like a medieval symptom,into one of the most emblematic works of the entire Renaissance.*à contretemps.