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

222 Confronting Imagesaffirm life. Again, then, it kills death—and to do this it kills withinitself, it represses the part of the image that is incarnational andmedieval, which nonetheless (and until the end of the sixteenth century)profoundly conditions it. 171Let’s try to be a bit more precise, or at least to illustrate throughexample. When we go to Florence to admire the masterpieces of theQuattrocento, we often remain stupefied, even gaping, before suchworks as the bust believed to be a portrait of Niccolò da Uzzano,executed in terra cotta (and what’s more painted) by the great Donatello.And when we find our voices, it is words like these that cometo us automatically: ‘‘That’s the height of realism.’’ 172 For it’s all here,as the saying goes: the texture of the skin, the wrinkles, the wart onthe left cheek, the projecting cheekbone of a man whom old age isbeginning to emaciate, etc. But for this very reason we see ‘‘life’’ in it,and we review in our minds—in authentically Vasarian fashion—theprogress in resemblance realized since the fourteenth century, and inthis work brought to a perfection that we don’t hesitate, from thatpoint forward, to call ‘‘humanist.’’ Here, then, an exemplary object inand around which the aesthetic equivalence of the terms ‘‘lifelike,’’‘‘natural,’’ ‘‘alive,’’ ‘‘renascent,’’ and ‘‘humanist’’ is fully functional.Now things didn’t happen quite the way Vasarian history wants usto think they did. The ‘‘height of realism,’’ visually, existed long beforeDonatello made what remains, nonetheless, a masterpiece ofsculpture. The ‘‘height of realism’’ existed in hundreds, even thousandsof objects that encumbered, notably, the Florentine church ofthe Santissima Annunziata. But they were not works of art. Theywere ex-votos, quite simply, or bòti as they were known in Florence: inshort, objects of a medieval religious piety that gradually disappeared,dooming these ‘‘hyperrealistic’’ portraits to total destruction. 173 Nomuseum wanted to retain a trace of these objects, nonetheless extraordinary.No history of art includes them in the great movementof figurative styles. But the archives, for their part, have preserved thememory of an intense activity whose professionals were known asfallimagini, or ‘‘image-makers.’’ People visited their shops in the Viadei Servi—that is, of the serviti of the Santissima Annunziata—to havemolds taken of their face and hands. From these, positive wax castings