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

Image as Rend 223were made, which were painted and completed, in some cases, by theaddition of artificial hair. These elements were then mounted on lifesizewood and plaster mannequins, which were decked out by thedonors—simultaneously the portrait subjects and the executors of apious vow, a contract with God—in some of their own clothing. 174Then the objects were added to a numerous and celebrated company(including wax effigies of Isabella d’Este, Frederick II of Aragon, LeoX, Clement VII, cardinals, and other uomini famosi) of silent worshipersof the Virgin. 175Why have such objects never entered the ‘‘great’’ history of art?Why has no one followed up on the brilliant intuition of the firstperson to draw attention to them, Aby Warburg, the most anthropologicalof art historians? 176 Not only did these figures have the aspectof ‘‘renascent’’ works in the middle of the fourteenth century; theyalso—to make matters even worse—did not want to be, and indeedwere not, ‘‘works of art.’’ Their operational model was by natureessentially indexical—based on an imprint, on character—and demandeda kind of artisanal technique and know-how that humanistnotions of invenzione and maniera had very little to do with. Nonetheless,this operative model, described very precisely, occasioned someof Cennini’s last chapters, notably one in which he declared ‘‘howuseful a thing is making imprints from nature’’ (come sia cosa utilel’improntare di naturale). 177 But Cennini was not about to relegate thecraft of the fallimagini into the shadows of a clandestine history.For that, it is Vasari who must take the credit. Vasari, who definitelywas familiar with the ex-votos of the Santissima Annunziata(they still crowded the church during his long sojourns in Florence).Vasari, who in his Lives took denial so far as to invert exactly the orderof inference in which we must think about such objects: he effectivelyinvented the fable of a Verrocchio who was ‘‘one of the first’’ (that is:in the second half of the fifteenth century) to use this technique ofmolds and positive wax castings, a Verrocchio who showed a famousartisan, Orsino—a great representative of the preeminent family offallimagini, the Benintendi—how to ‘‘become excellent’’ in the realismof his images (incominciò a mostrare come potesse in quella farsi eccellente).178 Obviously what happened was just the opposite, namely, that