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

216 Confronting ImagesSo painting elevates the hands and demands, desires science: there washere the sketch of an anagogical theory of painting, in accordance withthe idea at base Dionysian, relayed to the East by the Venetian-Byzantinetradition, and to the West by Abbot Suger and the whole Gothicaesthetic, of a materialis manuductio, in other words, a movementwherein the humiliation in the material and the humility of the materialproceed a bit like the incarnation of the divine Word itself: it isbeginning from the lowest point that a rise is most powerful. 158 So weshould not be surprised to see one of the three principal manuscriptsof the Libro dell’arte end with a ‘‘Hymn to God and the Blessed Maryeternally Virgin,’’ a hymn in which the words ‘‘God,’’ ‘‘desire,’’ and‘‘pain’’ rhyme with one another, as well as with, finally, the paradigmaticChristian unction that, decidedly, seems to harbor great riches:Concordia il tuo voler con quel Dio,E verratti compiuto ogni disio:Se povertà ti stringe o doglia senti,Va’ in su la croce a Cristo per unguenti. 159Here we are perfectly in step with the fourth and last legitimationwithin which the project of the Trattato was framed. With the returnto the cross, unction, and the divine will, we are already in the waitfor ends (I insist in saying that ends are not here separated from theirintermingled expectation, anguish, and desire). The golden age of Vasari,for its part, had already taken place, and the artists of his verypagan resurrection, from Apelles to Michelangelo, had been immortalfrom the outset (this is the nunquam periisse of the frontispiece to theLives); the final heaven where their memory was sung was certainlycalled ‘‘glorious,’’ but in the sense of fama, and was obtained at theend of the Judgment of history, if not of the historian. In Theophilusand Cennini, by contrast, the Judgment is none other than the sharedJudgment of mortals under the eye of God; it is identified with theend of time—in other words with a negation of history—holds socialfama in contempt, and accordingly has another value that is otherwisedefinitive, otherwise disquieting. This is what happens in the closinglines of Cennini’s treatise, where the reader is associated with theauthor himself in the uneasy hope of a quasi-liturgical formula evok-