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

History of Art, Practice 23its immediate whiteness it succeeds in becoming a matrix of virtualmeaning, a pigmental act of exegesis (and not of translation or ofattributing color)—a displacement strange and familiar, a mystery madepaint. How is this so? Would it suffice then to imagine the space thatfaces us ‘‘folded’’ along the line in the floor, in the image of the openbut empty book, in the image of the anagraphic Scripture of a revelation?Yes, in a sense this would suffice: I imagine that this might sufficefor a Dominican trained, over a period of years, to draw out of theslightest exegetical relationship a veritable deployment of this mysteryto which he dedicated his entire life.Of the few enigmatic words uttered by the angel of the Annunciation,these are central: Ecce concipies in utero, et paries filium, et vocabisnomen eius Iesum. ‘‘And behold, you will conceive in your womb andbear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus.’’ 8 The Christian traditionused the exegetical relationship already present in the sentence itself—anaccurate citation, except for a change in the person of theverbs, of a prophecy in Isaiah 9 —to open the little book of the Virginto the very page of the prophetic verse: thus could be closed, fromthe Annunciation, a loop of sacred time. All this, which is foundeverywhere in the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century iconography, FraAngelico did not deny; he simply included it in the white* mysterythat these sentences designate. The ‘‘empty’’ (rather: virtual) page inthe fresco answers the closed lips of the angel, and both point towardthe same mystery, the same virtuality. It is the birth-to-come of theWord made flesh, which in the Annunciation is just taking form,somewhere in the recesses of the Marian body. So it is understandablethat the audacious clarification of the image, this sort of stripping-bareor catharsis, aimed first to make the fresco itself mysterious and purelike a surface of unction—like a body sanctified in some lustralwater—so as to virtualize a mystery that it knew beforehand it wasincapable of representing.It is, then, the Incarnation. All of the unassuming painter’s theology,all of his life in the Dominican monastery, all of his aims wouldhave turned ceaselessly around this inconceivable, unintelligible cen-*blanc, which can also mean ‘‘blank.’’