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Notes 27929. See the remarkable article, suggestive in ways that transcend its specific subject,by Pierre Fédida, ‘‘Passé anachronique et présent reminiscent: Epos et puissance mémorialedu language,’’ L’Écrit du temps 10 (1985): 23–45. Another, equally suggestive discussionof the complex relationship between past and present is woven through the recent bookby Marie Moscovici, Il est arrivé quelque chose: Approches de l’événement psychique (Paris:Ramsay, 1989).30. See the fine book by P. Alféri, Guillaume d’Ockham: Le singulier (Paris: Minuit,1989).31. Hubert Damisch’s analysis of Las Meninas benefits greatly from his having considered,as crucially informative, the series of canvases painted by Picasso in the last fivemonths of 1957. See Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (1987; Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 432–47. I myself made a startling discovery about FraAngelico (of an unpublished portion, about 4.5 meters square, perfectly visible to all visitorsyet never ‘‘seen,’’ nor taken into account in the measurements of supposedly ‘‘complete’’catalogues of the artist’s work) on the basis of an ‘‘aesthetic’’ attention shaped bymy familiarity with contemporary art. See Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘‘La Dissemblancedes figures selon Fra Angelico,’’ Mélanges de l’École française de Rome/Moyen Âge—TempsModernes 98, no. 2 (1986): 709–802; republished in Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico. That thehistory of art in the ‘‘objective’’ genitive sense (the discipline) is crucially constitutive ofthe history of art in the ‘‘subjective’’ genitive sense (of contemporary art, for example) isforcefully demonstrated in Hans Belting, The End of the History of Art? trans. ChristopherS. Wood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Finally, I emphasize that the ‘‘encounter’’in question cannot function as a general model; it exemplifies only how a constraint(one imposed by the present) can be turned to advantage.32. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1972). The conceit of a period ‘‘looking at itself through its own eyes’’ isemphasized in the title of the French-language edition: L’Oeil du Quattrocento: L’Usage dela peinture dans l’Italie de la Renaissance, trans. Y. Delsaut (Paris: Gallimard, 1985). In thepreface, Baxandall himself writes that the fifth chapter of the book ‘‘assembles a basicfifteenth-century equipment for looking at fifteenth-century pictures’’ (unpaginated).33. Ibid., 110.34. ‘‘Vezzoso, wanton, mignard, full of wantonesse, quaint, blithe, buckesome, gamesome,flattring, nice, coy, squeamish, pert, pleasant, full of affectation.’’ John Florio in thefirst Italian-English dictionary (1598 and 1611), 147.35. Ibid., 147–51. For a more fully developed argument contesting the applicability ofLandino’s categories to Fra Angelico, see Didi-Huberman, Fra Angelico, 23–26.36. Robert Klein was fully aware of this when he wrote: ‘‘In the case of art history, inparticular, all theoretical problems . . . are reduced to the one and basic question: how toreconcile history, which furnishes its point of view, with art, which furnishes its object.’’Form and Meaning, 160.37. The literature on this question is vast. On Alexander Rodchenko, see N. Taraboukine,Le dernier Tableau, trans. A. B. Nakov and M. Pétris (Paris: Champ libre, 1972), esp.40–42. On Marcel Duchamp and the pronouncement ‘‘this is art,’’ see Thierry de Duve,Au Nom de l’art: Pour une archéologie de la modernité (Paris: Minuit, 1988). On postmodernism,see Yves-Alain Blois, ‘‘Modernisme et postmodernisme,’’ Encyclopédie Universalis: Symposium(Paris: E.U., 1988), 187–96.38. For a critique of the past in the history of art, for which he substitutes the two