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

2Art as Rebirth and the Immortality of the Ideal ManThe Renaissance arrived. A magnificent mythic tide, a golden age ofthe human spirit, the invented reign of all invention. The word has amagical sound—it is a word that promises. It seems to be conjugatedin the very special tense of a future in the throes of birth and selfremembrance,foreclosing the shadow of the past and of oblivion,announcing the dawn of all lucidity. It was during the Renaissance inItaly that art, as we still understand the term today—although moreand more ill—was perhaps invented and in any case solemnly invested.1 As if the question of origin, in this domain, could be articulatedhere only through this word renaissance, this word of repeatedorigin.One thing is certain, which is that between the origin and therepeated origin, the Quattrocento and then the Cinquecento inventedthe idea of a phoenix-age, an age when art would be reborn from itsashes. Which was to presuppose that there were ashes, that art hadbeen dead. By inventing something like a resurrection of art, the Renaissancedelivered, with the same blow, a fantasy of the death of art.Now what happened in the intervals separating the birth from thedeath, the death from the resurrection of art? Its conceptual historywas set in motion. The mythic flux of the Renaissance necessarilybore within itself the invention of a history: the invention of the historyof art. This connection between the Renaissance and the history of artis even today so constitutive, so preeminent, 2 that it is difficult to saywhether the notion of the Renaissance is the fruit of a great disciplinenamed the History of Art, or whether the very possibility and notionof a history of art is but the historical fruit of a great period named(by itself ) the Renaissance . . . Each of the hypotheses has its truthvalue, especially the second, which well explains why, four centuries