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

History of Art, Practice 13familiar to historians of art, who today strive to distinguish the master’sown hand from that of his students, to judge the coherence ofthe perspective construction, to situate the work in Angelico’s chronologyas well as in the stylistic landscape of fifteenth-century Tuscanpainting. The fresco will become visible also—and even primarily—because something in it has managed to evoke or ‘‘translate’’ for usmore complex units, ‘‘themes’’ or ‘‘concepts,’’ as Panofsky would say,stories or allegories: units of knowledge. At this moment, the perceivedfresco becomes really, fully visible—it becomes clear and distinctas if it were making itself explicit. It becomes legible.So here we are, capable, or supposedly so, of reading Angelico’sfresco. What we read there, of course, is a story—a historia such asAlberti deemed the reason and final cause for all painted compositions2 . . . A story such as historians cannot help but love. Little bylittle, then, our sense of the image’s temporality changes: its characterof obscured immediacy passes into the background, so to speak, anda sequence, a narrative sequence, appears before our very eyes tooffer itself for reading, as if the figures seen in a flash as motionlesswere henceforth endowed with a kind of kinetics or temporal unfolding.No longer the permanence of crystal but the chronology of astory. Here, in Angelico’s image, we have the simplest possible case:a story that everyone knows, a story whose ‘‘source’’—whose originaltext—art historians need not research, so central is it to the culturalbaggage of the Christian West. Almost as soon as it is visible, then,the fresco sets about ‘‘telling’’ its story of the Annunciation as SaintLuke had first written it in his Gospel. There is every reason to believethat a budding iconographer entering this tiny cell would need only acouple of seconds, once the fresco was visible, to read into it: Luke1:26–38. An incontrovertible judgment. A judgment that, who knows,might make one want to do the same thing for all the pictures in theworld . . .But let’s try to go a bit farther. Or rather let’s stay a momentlonger, face to face with the image. Quite soon, our curiosity aboutdetails of representation is likely to diminish, and a certain unease, acertain disappointment begin to dim, yet again, the clarity of ourgazes. Disappointment with what is legible: this fresco presents itself