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

238 Appendix: Detail and Pancovered by iconology. There obviously are ‘‘reasonable’’ distances atwhich details do not collapse, do not crumble into a pure coloredmorass. There are very numerous and pertinent knives and corkscrews,clearly identifiable in very numerous figurative paintings. 20But it is also necessary constantly to problematize the dichiarazione,to use Ripa’s word, of painted figures. It is necessary to pose to eachdeclarative assertion (it is / it is not) the question of the quasi.For every detail in painting is over-determined. Let’s take the celebratedexample of Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus (Fig. 13): the detail par excellencehere would be the little feathers that we see fluttering down,falling all around the engulfed body—but not completely engulfed,for if it were, how could we see that it is engulfed? There must indeedbe a quasi here to make the signified act visible. In any case, thesefeathers seem indicative of the most refined descriptive care: to painta fall of Icarus, and even the famous feathers unglued by the sun’sheat, feathers here made to resemble a discreetly meticulous rain,falling more slowly than the body, designating to the gaze the zoneof the fall. If the body had disappeared completely, the fall still wouldhave been ‘‘described’’ by these feathers, by this descriptive supplement.But at the same time, the little feathers in Brueghel’s paintingare indications, perhaps the only ones, of the historia, of the narrativity:it is only the concomitance of a body falling into the sea (likesome ‘‘man overboard’’) and these modest feathers that liberate thesignification ‘‘Icarus.’’ In this regard, the feathers are an iconographicattribute necessary for the representation of the mythological scene.Now if we look at the as-if, the quasi; if we attend to the material,we note that the details called ‘‘feathers’’ have no distinctive featuresthat ‘‘separate’’ them completely from the foam produced, in the sea,by the falling body: they are whitish accents of paint, surface scansionson top of the ‘‘background’’ (the water) and around the ‘‘figure’’ (thetwo ends of a human body disappearing into the water). They are likethe foam, and yet not like it, not completely. But then nothing hereis ‘‘completely.’’ Everything is not-quitely. That’s neither descriptivenor narrative; it’s the in-between, purely pictorial, pale, of a signified‘‘feather’’ and a signified ‘‘foam’’; in other words, it is not a semioticallystable entity. But then why do we see feathers anyway? Because