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

History of Art, Practice 25the eyes to close before the fresco. It is, in the visible world, thatagent of ‘‘catastrophe’’ or foliation, that visual agent fit for casting theDominican’s gaze toward a realm of pure fantasy—the one ultimatelydesignated by the expression visio Dei. It is, then, in all of the word’smany senses, a surface of expectancy: it takes us out of the visible and‘‘natural’’ spectacle; it takes us out of history and makes us wait foran extreme modality of the gaze, a dreamed modality, never completelythere, something like an ‘‘end of the gaze’’—as we use thephrase ‘‘the end of time’’ to designate the ultimate object of Judeo-Christian desire. So we understand how this white of Angelico’s, thisvisible almost-nothing, will finally manage to touch, concretely, uponthe famous mystery of this fresco: the Annunciation, the announcement.Fra Angelico reduced all his visible means of imitating the appearanceof an Annunciation in order to give himself a visual agentfit for imitating the process of such an announcement. In other words,something that appears, that presents itself—but without describingor representing, without making visible the content of the announcement(otherwise it would no longer be an announcement, exactly, buta statement of its issue). 10There is here a marvel of figurability—in the image of everythingthat consumes us in the self-evidence of dreams. It sufficed that thisparticular white be there. Intense as light (we find it, in adjacent cells,in radiant mandorlas and divine glories) and opaque as rock (it is alsothe mineral white of all tombs). Its mere presentation makes of it theimpossible material of a light offered with its obstacle: a patch* of wallwith its own mystical evaporation. Should we be surprised to find thesame paradoxical image within the thread of luxuriant Dominicanexegeses of the mystery of the Incarnation? It matters little whetherFra Angelico did or did not read this or that commentary on theAnnunciation comparing the Word made flesh to an intense luminositythat traverses all barriers and coils within the white cell of theuterus Mariae. 11 . . . The important thing is not some improbable translation,term-for-term, of a specific theological exegesis, but an authenticexegetical work that the very use of a pigment successfully*pan.