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

Image as Rend 213nini’s book is wholly analogous . . . except that the meaning iscompletely inversed. Let’s try to summarize its principal aspects.Where Vasari made his révérence to the prince (even to the pope), inthe mannerist gesture of a head that bows only to look upward, herethe necks remain bent in the definitive humility of the relationship ofobedience to which they lay claim with regard to God and his saints.Theophilus, for example, presents himself from the outset as ‘‘a humblepriest, a servant of the servants of God, unworthy of the nameand profession of monk’’; he does not hesitate to describe himself asa ‘‘wretched and almost nameless man . . . fearing to incur the terriblejudgment’’ meted out to anyone who might appear in God’s eyes apoor servant of the Gospel. 149 So it is with regard to the sacred textthat the relationship of obedience is finally formulated. As for Cennini,no more than Theophilus does he write under the gaze of princes,but under that, otherwise disquieting, of a divine throne and a learnedgathering of saints:Here begins the craftsman’s handbook, made and composedby Cennino of Colle, in the reverence of God, and of theVirgin Mary, and of Saint Eustace, Saint Francis, Saint Johnthe Baptist, Saint Anthony of Padua, and in general of thesaints of God. 150After this first and essential legitimation comes that, more concrete,of the constitution of a social body of the figurative arts. Butwhere Vasari invoked the glory (fama) of a conquering and alreadyself-legitimizing elite, Theophilus expounded the slow progression ofthe apprentice toward mastery—a mastery immediately detachedfrom its human subject so as to be attributed solely to divine goodwill: ‘‘Those who will possess [the art] should not glory in it as in agood of their own, and which they have not received; let them humblygive thanks unto the Lord, from whom and by whom all thingscome, and without whom nothing exists.’’ 151 Cennini, in his turn, legitimizedhis own mastery only in terms of a relation of filiation andtradition expressed by the riverenza due the master (in his case, AgnoloGaddi), then to the master of the master (Taddeo Gaddi, Agnolo’sfather), then to the master of the master of the master (Giotto him-