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

Image as Rend 203conversely, it resembles quite precisely a process—a gesture of unction,even of consecration, that it reenacts (in other words reactualizes,makes concrete again) more than it imitates.To anoint is to cast a liquid—oil, scent, tears, even paint—ontosomething that one wants to sanctify, or, more generally, whose symbolicstatus one wants to modify. It is a rite of passage: one anointsnewborn babes to baptize them, one anoints the dead to send themto some ‘‘habitable’’ beyond. One also anoints altars to consecratethem, and one asperses icons with holy water to render them efficacious.135 All of this, yet again, exists solely on the foundation of theincarnational given: it presupposes that the word can be incarnated,and that its abstract power knows how to become—in a becomingcalled mystery, miracle, or sacrament—palpable as flesh or pigment.The blood of Christ on the ‘‘stone of unction,’’ it was still recountedin Fra Angelico’s day, had anointed the stone in return, had made it,it was said, permanently red; and it was also recounted that the tearscast by the Virgin over his dead body had ‘‘imprinted’’ white constellationson the patch* of darkened stone . . . Doubtless there is somethingof all this in the strange pictorial choice of the Dominican artist;something that would have aimed to project† the iconic surface itselftoward the more sacred regions where in one sense the relic operates,and in another sense the sacrament does. At about the same timethat Fra Angelico realized his frescos in San Marco, some believers inBohemia did not hesitate to ‘‘consecrate’’ certain Marian icons withpaint: they freely traced, with two large brush strokes, a sign of thecross that in some sort ‘‘crossed out’’ the representation of fauxmarbre—thelatter already fragile as representation, devoted to theblotch rather than to appearance—that covered their backs 136 (Fig. 10).So there is an old painting practice that knows how to break withthe quest for appearance, since at a certain moment its imitative gesturedesires rather to bear on a process, on the more immediate givenof an intimate liturgy, on the radical requirement of an act aiming toreenact a mystery of Incarnation. This is what happened in the East-*pan.†projeter.