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

224 Confronting Imagesthe ‘‘great artists’’ of the fifteenth century—including Verrocchio, ofcourse, but also Donatello before him—integrated the artisanal knowhowof these obscure ex-voto suppliers into their aesthetic stakes.Vasari’s having so carefully obscured the meaning* of this episode, amajor one in the history of resemblance, indicates that an importantmove was in play here: it was effectively a question of releasing resemblancefrom the drama within which Christianity continued tothink it. It was a question of making it into an artistic aim, a vectorof success and humanitas. To do this, it was necessary to kill the image,and kill with it the activity that produced images in accordance withthe more modest ends of what we call an artisanal culture.Thus it was not solely to the end—the most obvious, certainly—ofconstituting painting, sculpture, and architecture as ‘‘major’’ or ‘‘liberal’’arts that Vasari excluded the craft of the fallimagini from theideal schema of his history of art. It was also a question, and in thesame movement, of saving resemblance: of making it into an artists’project, a conquest of the ‘‘natural,’’ of life, and of constituting it asan authentically ‘‘humanist’’ category. So it was necessary to forgetthat the resemblance of the bòti had not been an end in itself, but apartial clause in a great contract executed with God, between desireand promise, prayer and active grace. 179 It was necessary to forget thatthe resemblance of the bòti had not been thought in isolation as asearch for an adequate aspect, but that it belonged to a symbolic systemthat offered other possible ways of unfolding: for example bòtithat were only a mass of unformed wax, but with exactly the sameweight—the parameter of resemblance in such cases—as thedonor . . .Vasari, finally, tried to forget that these indexical techniques of‘‘trait-for-trait’’ resemblance had been preeminently mortuary techniques.It is not by chance that Cennini never, not once, uses theadjective vivo when writing about imprints di naturale (whereas Vasariultimately conflates the two notions). To make an imprint of a stilllivingface—which demanded an adaptation, the invention of meanswhereby the subject could continue to breath—this was to use the*sens, which can also mean ‘‘direction.’’