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

Image as Rend 217ing ‘‘glory on high for ever and ever, Amen’’ (e finalmente nell’altro[mondo] per gloria, per infinita secula seculorum—Amen). 160 This is whathappens earlier in the last lines of the prologue, wherein Theophilusimpugns in advance all ‘‘temporal reward’’ for his art, and speaks of aglory that was neither fama nor that of his own name, but indeedgloria, the glory of the divine name alone:When you have read and reread these things many times,and have engraved them in your memory, as reward for theinstruction that you have drawn from my writing, each timethat my work has been useful to you, pray on my behalf tomerciful and almighty God, who knows that I did not writethis book from love for human praise, nor from a desire fortemporal reward, that I have hidden nothing precious or rarefrom a feeling of jealousy, or to keep secrets for myself alone,but that, to increase the honor and glory of His name, I havewanted to satisfy needs and aid the progress of a great manymen. 161We could, facing these lines and their Vasarian counterpoint, sumthings up in a comfortable way: on the one side would be the religiousMiddle Ages, and on the other the humanist Renaissance; a ‘‘blackcesspool of hellish notions’’ on the one hand,’’ 162 and on the otherthe lucid visibility of perspectival, constructed, ‘‘natural,’’ Albertianpaintings; a time that is sacred, static, and hierarchical on the one side,a dynamic and liberal human progress on the other . . . But this wouldbe precisely to renew all the lines of division on which Vasari basedhis sense of history and his ideal of artistic progress. This would be,in particular, to forget that the manuscript of Cennino Cennini wasrecopied throughout the fifteenth century, and that the four piousverses from the Riccardiano manuscript quoted above were copiedright in the middle of the sixteenth century. This would be to forgetthe ‘‘black cesspool of hellish notions’’ that, as late as 1511, still accompaniedthe desperately medieval Christ of Dürer. Moreover, the MiddleAges were no more ‘‘dark’’ and self-mourning than theRenaissance was ‘‘lucid’’ and self-satisfied. Vasari wanted to make usbelieve this—and first of all to make his patron, Cosimo de’ Medici,