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

History of Art, Practice 41soon realize the limitations of this analytic principle, even its sophism.The thirty-year interval between the death of Fra Angelico and Landino’spronouncements about his work suffice to introduce a screenof anachronism: the analytic categories used by Landino and then byBaxandall—in particular, the categories vezzoso 34 and devoto—show theextent to which misunderstanding can result from slight shifts inmeaning. For between chronological moment X (and the uniquespace attached to it), when Fra Angelico developed his ‘‘devout’’ art,and the moment X 30, when Landino made his judgments, themeaning of the category devoto, along with that of other categoriesfundamental to painting, for example, figura and historia, changedcompletely. Thus we can say that, in the narrow space of these thirtyyears, the historian let himself be trapped by an anachronistic past,when he thought only about escaping the trap of the anachronisticpresent. 35So we see how the past itself can screen out the past. Anachronismis not, in history, something that must be absolutely banished—in theend, this is no more than a fantasy or an ideal of equivalence—butrather something that must be negotiated, debated, and perhaps eventurned to advantage. If the historian generally chooses straightawaycategories from the past (whatever it might be) over categories fromthe present, that is because he is constitutionally inclined to placetruth on the side of the past (whatever it might be) and is wary, noless constitutionally, of anything that might signify ‘‘in the present.’’One has the impression, in the multiple movements of these various‘‘natural’’ inclinations and suspicions, that theory is being rejected infavor of specifics, that the art historian is only taking literally the verywords that designate his own practice, the words history and art. Onehas the impression that a (particularly academic) social or discursiveidentity is being played out through all of these movements—but inthe mode of something unthought. And it is because the unthoughthere controls the whole game, the troubled play of demands and rejections,that art and history, far from forming a definitive foundationfor the practice that conjugates them, are revealed as constituting itsprincipal epistemological impediments . . .This hypothesis might seem surprising. Nonetheless, it follows log-