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

212 Confronting Imagesoffensive. 145 It would be said that the episode of the Crucifixion providedthe central event in which the ‘‘equal resemblance’’ submitsitself to the ordeal of an ignominious disfiguration. It would furtherbe said that resemblance to God remains for human beings the objectof a desire that will not be satisfied until the end of time: until then,men will only search within themselves for fragments, for vestiges(vestigia) of the resemblance ruined in time past by the sin of thefirst earthly son. Until then, men will only wander in a ‘‘region ofdissemblance’’ (regio dissimilitudinis), a region—our own—regardingwhich a furious Father still refuses the gift of his face. 146How could religious painters have managed to hold themselvesapart from such an anthropology, which situated resemblance as theimpossible object par excellence, the ungraspable object (at least forthe living), and the sensible world, the world of bodies to be imitated,as an emporium of dissemblances, at best a universe marked with vestiges,with ‘‘traces of the soul’’ before which one had to purify oneself,strip oneself, in order to apprehend them? Christian anthropology andthe bundle of great theological traditions oblige us, then, to ask ourselveshow religious painters, like other Christians, sought resemblance(to God) in order to save their souls, and how in order to dothis they sought to ‘‘open’’ (sensible, aspectual) resemblances in theirpaintings to the point of altering them—of intentionally altering them.On this side of this question, which again engages the radical understandingof the word figura in the Middle Ages, we can find out fromthe great pre-Vasarian pictorial treatises how the stakes of an artisticpractice could be envisaged within the anxiety-causing framework ofthis ‘‘drama of resemblance,’’ this drama that turned relentlesslyaround the death of the god-image, around death per se and the question:will we be saved?So let’s also open, barely, one or two of these painters’ treatises, afew fine examples of which have survived from the Middle Ages. 147Let’s open, for example, the manual by Theophilus, which probablydates from the twelfth century, and the Libro dell’arte by CenninoCennini. 148 What’s the first thing we find there? As in Vasari, we findthere the putting into place—and the ‘‘framing’’—of certain proceduresof legitimation. It might even be said that the schema in Cen-