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

History of Art, Practice 15painted in broad brush strokes very different from the pavements constructedby Piero della Francesca or even Botticelli. Only the two faceshave been emphasized: heightened lightly with white, worked withcrimson. The rest is but contempt for details, the rest is but strangelacunae, from the fleet pictography of the angel’s wings and the unlikelychaos of the Virgin’s robe to the mineral vacuity of the simpleplace that here comes to confront us.This impression of ‘‘ill-seen-ill-said’’* has led many art historians toa mixed judgment of both the artist’s work generally and the artisthimself. He is sometimes presented as a succinct, even naive painter—blissfully happy and ‘‘angelic,’’ in a slightly pejorative sense—of thereligious iconography to which he exclusively devoted himself. Elsewhere,by contrast, the artist’s bliss and angelic temperament areturned to positive account: if the visible and the legible are not FraAngelico’s strong points, that is because his concern was with, precisely,the invisible, the ineffable. If there is nothing between the angeland the Virgin in his Annunciation, that is because the nothing borewitness to the indescribable and unfigurable divine voice to whichAngelico, like the Virgin, was obliged to submit completely . . . Sucha judgment clearly touches upon something pertinent to the religious,even mystical status of the artist’s work in general. But it refuses tounderstand the means, the material in which this status existed. Itturns its back to the specifics of painting and fresco. It does this so asto proceed without them—which is also to say without Fra Angelico—intothe dubious realm of a metaphysics, an idea, a belief withoutsubject. It thinks painting can be understood only by disembodying it,so to speak. In fact, it functions—like the preceding judgment—withinthe arbitrary limits of a semiology that has only three categories: thevisible, the legible, and the invisible. Thus, apart from the intermediarystatus of the legible (where what’s at stake is translatability), anyoneposing his gaze to Angelico’s fresco is faced with a choice. Heeither grasps it, in which case we are in the world of the visible, whichit is possible to describe; or he doesn’t grasp it, in which case we arein the region of the invisible, where a metaphysics is possible, from*mal vu mal dit.