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

14 Confronting Imagesas the most poorly and summarily recounted story there could be.No salient detail, no discernible particular, will tell us how Fra Angelico‘‘saw’’ the town of Nazareth—the ‘‘historical’’ site of the Annunciation—orhelp us to situate the meeting of the angel and the VirginMary. There’s nothing picturesque in this painting: it’s as taciturn asthey come. Luke relates the story in spoken dialogue, but Angelico’sfigures seem frozen forever in a kind of silent reciprocity, all lipssealed. No sentiments are expressed here; there’s no action, no pictorialtheatrics. And the peripheral presence of Saint Peter Martyr, handsclasped, won’t change the story, because Saint Peter has exactly nothingto do with it; he just makes the event seem less real.The work will also disappoint art historians well acquainted withthe characteristic profusion of Quattrocento Annunciations: they almostalways abound in apocryphal details, fanciful illusions, outrageouslycomplicated spatial construction, realist touches, objects of dailylife, and chronological reference points. Here—save for the traditionallittle book clasped by the Virgin—nothing of the kind. It would seemthat Fra Angelico lacked aptitude for an aesthetic quality consideredessential in his day: varietà, which Alberti made a major paradigmfor ‘‘historical’’ pictorial invention. 3 In these times of ‘‘rebirth,’’ whenMasaccio in painting and Donatello in sculpture reinvented dramaticpsychology, our fresco cuts a pale figure indeed, with its very poor,very minimalist invenzione.The ‘‘disappointment’’ we are talking about has no other source,obviously, than the odd particular aridity with which Fra Angelicohas grasped*—solidified or coagulated, by contrast with an instantrendered ‘‘on the wing’’—the visible world of his fiction. Space hasbeen reduced to a pure place of memory. Its scale (the figures a bitsmaller than ‘‘life’’-size, if such a word is appropriate here) impedesall vague trompe-l’oeil desires, even if the small represented enclosurein a certain sense extends the cell’s white architecture. And despitethe interplay of the ceiling vaults, the painted space at eye level seemsto present only an abutment† of whitewash, its abruptly rising floor*saisi.†buté, homonymous with butée, ‘‘mulish’’ or ‘‘stubborn.’’