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

History of Art, Practice 19whence it draws its necessity, which it condenses, displaces, and transfigures.So perhaps we must call it a symptom, the suddenly manifestedknot of an arborescence of associations or conflicting meanings.To say that the visual realm produces a ‘‘symptom’’ is not to lookfor some defect or morbid state floating hither and thither betweenthe angel and the Virgin of Fra Angelico. It is, more simply, to tryto recognize the strange dialectic according to which the work, bypresenting itself suddenly to the gaze of its viewer, upon entry into thecell, simultaneously delivers the complex skein of a virtual memory:latent, efficacious. Now all this is not simply a matter of our contemporarygaze. The presentation of the work, the dramaturgy of its immediatevisuality are integral to the work itself, and to the pictorialstrategy specific to Fra Angelico. The artist could very well have executedhis frescos on one of the cell’s three other walls, which is to sayon surfaces correctly lit and not illuminating, as is the case here. Hecould also very well have dispensed with such an intense use of white,criticized in his day as producing a tension that was aesthetically disagreeable.5 Finally, the skein of virtual memory that we have hypothesizedwithout, for all that, ‘‘reading’’ it immediately in the white ofthis fresco and in its very poor iconography—this skein of virtualmemory might very well traverse our fresco, pass like a wind betweenthe two or three figures of our Annunciation. Everything that weknow about Fra Angelico and about his life in the monastery effectivelyteaches us this: the formidable exegetical training required ofevery novice, the sermons, the prodigiously fecund use of the ‘‘arts ofmemory,’’ the armful of Greek and Latin texts in the library of SanMarco, only a few steps from the little cell, the enlightened presenceof Giovanni Dominici and Saint Antoninus of Florence in the painter’simmediate entourage: all this comes to confirm the hypothesis of apainting virtually proliferating with meaning . . . and to accentuatethe paradox of visual simplicity in which this fresco places us.Such, then, is the not-knowledge that the image proposes to us.This not-knowledge is double: it concerns first the fragile evidence ofa phenomenology of the gaze, which the historian doesn’t quite knowwhat to do with because it is graspable only through his own gaze,his own specific gaze that strips it bare. It also concerns a forgotten,