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

54 Confronting Imagesafter its dawning, the history of art can still place itself under the signof humanism, 3 or under the implicit constraint of a cruel postulatethat might be stated as follows: either art is dead, or art is renascent,and if it is renascent it will only be that much more immortal ...This postulate in fact pertains to a movement of identification, ofself-recognition and triumphant desire. It is my hypothesis that theinvention of the history of art—in the objective genitive sense: thediscipline that takes art as its object—was invented as a necessarystage in the self-recognition of art by itself, its baptism in some sense.As if, in order to be recognized as a distinct subject (and a ‘‘distinguished’’one, in both senses of the word), Renaissance art were constrained,at a certain moment, to posit itself as an object under thegaze of others (in fact, under the gaze of princes): an object that wouldtake on all of its meaning the moment it had a history. The inventionof the history of art was, then, the specifically identificatory work ofa practice that sought—beyond itself, like its idea or its ideal—toground itself in the dogmatic and social order. To do this, it had tocarry out a work of scission: it had to sever the history of art in theobjective genitive sense from the history of art in the subjective genitivesense—a practice henceforth reified (by itself, by others), but finallyendowed with meaning, identified.The bulk of this work of identification was accomplished in thesixteenth century by an artist skillful and sincere, cultivated andcourtly, an artist incredibly dogged in his work, who covered hundredsof square feet with allegorical paintings in Rome, Naples, Venice,Bologna, and above all Florence, who designed several palaces(notably the one that was to become the most prestigious museum ofItalian Renaissance painting, the Uffizi), an artist who devised tombsand who oversaw the official funeral of Michelangelo—but whosemost celebrated work rightly remains the gigantic historical text inwhich he recounts The Lives of the Best Italian Architects, Painters, andSculptors from Cimabue to the Present Day. 4 I refer, of course, to GiorgioVasari, architect and painter to the duchy of Tuscany in the time ofCosimo de’ Medici, friend to humanists, founder of the Accademia,enlightened collector, and, finally, ‘‘the veritable patriarch and Fatherof the Church of the history of art,’’ in the oft-cited characterization