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

Image as Rend 225age-old technique of the imago, or mortuary effigy, transformed symbolicallyto serve the magic of a ‘‘vow’’ that connected the Florentinemerchant to the Great Manager of his death-to-come. 180 The admirablestatue of Niccolò da Uzzano would be in this connection at theplace of perfect equilibrium: it speaks to us of life because the headturns upward, as if animated by a desire, and through the paintedgaze with which Donatello so wonderfully endowed it. But its nature—beginningwith its mode of operation—continues to pay its tributeto the mortifying essence of the imago. We understand thiscompletely when looking at another statue, one nearby in the sameroom of the Museo di Bargello: it is the bust of a woman—long attributedto Donatello, moreover—that likewise pays death the tribute ofits too exact resemblance (Fig. 12). The subtle weakening of the tegumentsunder the weight of the drying plaster, the cadaverous rigidity,the closed eyes, all this obliges the affecting face henceforth to resembleonly its most exact, impersonal, and dramatic resemblance—itsresemblance to being dead. 181To the Vasari who dreamt of a resemblance conceived as gain, asart, as life, the images of the Florentine fifteenth century persisted inopposing a resemblance conceived as a gift offered to God, as suretyfor a supernatural contract and as sign of an impending death. Tooffer an ex-voto to the church of the Santissima Annunziata or tohave one’s portrait sculpted for placement opposite an imago pietatis inthe church of Santa Croce, this was doubtless to affirm something—asymbolic power—to the citizens of Florence, but it was also to depriveoneself of something, to make a sacrificial gift of one’s natural resemblancein view of another resemblance, that, supernatural, of ‘‘anotherlife’’ in the heavens—of death, in short. That’s why the ‘‘resembling’’images, the ‘‘accurate’’ or realist images of the Quattrocento do notalways have the optimism, even triumphalism that Vasari wanted toproject onto all of them. Although resembling, it also knows how toimpose upon us the disconcerting strangeness, the secret disfigurationof its mode of presentation. Through the light but insistent traces ofits contact with death, through the invasive visual index of its facedrowned in a bronze as black as a veil of mourning, the statue inthe Bargello, too, estranges itself. As must have seemed strange—even