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

Image as Rend 215[rinvenne di sua scienza di bisogno era trovare modo da viveremanualmente]. And so he started with the spade, and Eve,with spinning. Man afterward pursued many useful skills[molte arti bisognevoli], differing from each other; and somewere, and are, more scientific [di maggiore scienza] than others;they could not all be alike, since science is the most worthy.Close to that, man pursued some related to the onewhich calls for a basis of that, coupled with skill of hand: andthis is an occupation known as painting. 154The traditional, even ‘‘ordinary’’ character of this opening doesnot, however, give us warrant to neglect it. 155 We must take note ofthe fact that a book where the author was to provide an ‘‘explanationof light’’ (ragione della luce), ‘‘the manner and order of drawing’’ (elmodo e l’ordine del disegnare), and even a ‘‘way to copy the substanceof a good figure’’ (in che modo ritrarre la sustanza di una buona figura), 156we must take note of the fact that all this was established on the siltof Adam’s fault and the lost image. Cennini specified this by sayingthat the loss of the image ought to correspond to the birth of ‘‘need’’(bisogno), and the loss of science—that innate science that made Adama being cognizant of his God—ought to correspond to manual labor(‘‘operazione di mano’’). So the existence of different ‘‘skills’’ (molte arti)was, from the outset, thought as an effect of need, thus of sin and ofthe lack of ‘‘science.’’ We understand then that the word scienza, asused in this context of a biblical narrative of origins, does not makedo with referring to the canonical distinction between the ‘‘liberalarts’’ and the ‘‘mechanical arts’’; it also evokes everything that theologiansmight say about it—and everything that the faithful might begiven to understand about it by church sermons—namely the reconquest,even partial, of suprasensible resemblance. 157It is from this point forward that the legitimization of pictorial art,even its claim to the status of a ‘‘liberal art,’’ will pass from uneasymanagement of an original fall and a dereliction—for painting figureswould never amount to removing oneself from the ‘‘region of dissemblance’’in which all sinners are caught—to hope for an ascendantmovement, to hope for a chance at salvation. Painting demands thehands, the sign of a punishment, but is not subject to the law of need.