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

Image as Rend 193Image not availableFIG 6 Anonymous (Italian), The Holy Face, 1621–23.Copy on canvas of Veronica’s veil, commissioned byPope Gregory XV for the Duchess of Sforza. Rome,Gesù.ment the exactitude of their visibility, required from the start by alliconological approaches. The images we have just discussed are notanalyzable solely through description and through statements of whatthey imitate; they can also be analyzed in terms of the particular waythat they prevent all exact description, the particular procedures thatthey implement to touch a region with which ‘‘art’’—in the humanistand academic sense of the word—no longer has anything to do, givingway to something that pertains rather to an anthropology of gazes.Such images are generally excluded from the corpus of the history ofart, since they are first of all relics, and do everything to obliterate the‘‘manner’’ or simply the craftsmanship—fatally clandestine, so tospeak, and doubtless impossible to recover today—that gave birth tothem: how could we ‘‘attribute’’ something like the Holy Veil, since