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

Image as Rend 195by the kind of winners’ list to which Vasarian history has long sinceaccustomed us. A rather trivial example—but interesting in relationto our theme, and what’s more, taken from Vasari himself—mighthelp us to get some traction on the question. It is a particularly unattractive,or at least bizarre work painted in Rome by a rather obscureartist, Ugo dei Conti da Panico, known as Ugo da Carpi (Fig. 7). Thepainting, which the curators of the Vatican Museums felt no obligationto keep in their public collections, was made between 1524 and1527 for the altar of Saint Veronica in the old Saint Peter’s Basilica. Arthistorians have uncovered the compositional—but not stylistic—original in a superb drawing of the same subject by Parmigianino inthe Uffizi 127 (Fig. 8). But one senses at a glance that, despite their closerelation in terms of artistic invenzione, the two works and fundamentallydiscordant.* Parmigianino’s drawing, squared for transfer, openlyproclaims its stylistic power; it shows Veronica exhibiting a veil onwhich Christ’s face stands out clearly, disproportionately large butwithout doubt a real head, in any case a portrait shaded to create theillusion of three-dimensionality.Drawing close to the painting by Ugo da Carpi, one discovers bycontrast a rather static and awkward way of proceeding, very far fromthe extreme virtuosity displayed by Parmigianino in his drawing. Onenotices above all that what the Saint Veronica displays is not really a‘‘portrait’’ of Christ but rather a receding† of the face that ‘‘sinks’’ anddistances itself behind an arbitrary contour reminiscent of a Byzantineframe. The face, if it is there, does not emerge from the darkness butdisappears into it. And moreover it isn’t there. For what the representedsaint, in the end, only presents on her veil is a ‘‘portrait’’ notof Christ but of Veronica’s Veil itself, the actual relic venerated in SaintPeter’s in Rome. The kind of primitivism of the style is more readilyexplained by this intention to stick with the scarcely ‘‘living’’ appearanceof a relic, by contrast with the more ‘‘humanist’’ intention toinvent a living face for the Christ of the Passion. But that’s not all.Ugo da Carpi himself in a sense justified the rather crude appearance*n’ont fondamentalement rien ‘‘à voir.’’†retrait: wordplay with portrait and trait, ‘‘line’’ or ‘‘feature.’’