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History of Art, Practice 47of the prefix ‘‘neo’’) to three claims about history. First: the motor of(art) history is ‘‘beyond’’ its singular figures. It is this beyond that,properly speaking, is realized through it, that perfects itself in thecolmo della perfezione. Vasari often characterizes it as divino—the divinethat designated and even touched Michelangelo with its finger so asto realize itself. It can also be called Idea, it can also be called Spirit. 44In question here is the long and hardy tradition of historical idealism.Second: history is thought with the death of its figures or of itssingular objects. It is, says Hegel, the ‘‘prodigious labor of history’’ tohave incarnated the total content of Spirit in every form, but througha continuous movement of negation and ‘‘sublation’’ (Aufhebung) inwhich every form exhausts itself and dies so as to reveal its own truthto history. 45 Thus some have taken literally Hegel’s famous dictumabout the end of art, 46 whose implications for art historians amountto an odd amalgam of paradox and cruel common sense: better towait for the death of one’s object—or, at the limit, to have killed itwith one’s own hands—so as to be sure to produce a history of it thatis absolute, complete, and true . . . Third, then: this double work ofSpirit and Death provides access to something like Absolute Knowledge.One recalls the rise of the theme of conceived history in the last twopages of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel proposes the prodigiousmetaphorical conceit of Becoming as a ‘‘picture gallery’’ thatrequires a ‘‘withdrawal into itself’’ of Spirit, which gives rise on theone hand to History, and on the other hand to a ‘‘new world’’—theever hoped-for world of Absolute Knowledge:But the other side of [Spirit’s] Becoming, History, is a consciousself-mediating process . . . This Becoming presents aslow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of pictures [eineGalerie von Bildern], each of which, endowed with all theriches of Spirit, moves thus slowly just because the Self hasto penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. Asits fulfillment [Vollendung] consists in perfectly knowing whatit is [vollkommen zu wissen], in knowing its substance, thisknowing is its withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its