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

56 Confronting Imagesing its readers to the banks of a new age of knowledge about art. Theframe of the Lives should be read—and seen—as a complex, layeredsystem of legitimation procedures. It is a ‘‘working’’ frame; it is a riteof passage defining a perimeter that we cross when we open the book;it is the definition of a new playing field, a new temple: the history ofart. Vasari invites his readers into the Lives by presenting them with,by turns, four types of legitimation, whose mere clarification can tellus much about the ends that he set himself, in other words about thegreat identificatory movement mentioned above. To open the Lives isalready to pull off the petals* of the subtle dialectic by which a humanpractice sought its symbolic recognition (to recognize itself and tomake itself recognized) by postulating an auto-teleology: that it had noends but itself, and that one could in this sense recount its history, itsvery specific history . . .Subtle, this dialectic. It brings to mind one of those strange headmovements doubtless current in all sixteenth-century Europeancourts, a movement wherein the head inclines only the better to turnupward. This is the révérence, a politesse of power signifying roughly:‘‘I am at your service’’; then: ‘‘Acknowledge that you cannot do withoutme’’; and finally: ‘‘I am my own person, for I am of noble extraction.’’Vasari proceeded likewise: politely, diplomatically. His firstlegitimation procedure in writing the Lives was to establish a relationof obedience, traditional for all that, and to begin by bowing low beforethe ‘‘most illustrious and most excellent Signor Cosimo de’ Medici,duke of Florence,’’ whose hands Vasari kisses ‘‘most humbly’’ (umilissimamenteLe bacio le mani) and to whom he dedicates his work. Thusit is ‘‘under your most honored name’’ (sotto l’onoratissimo nome Suo)that he wishes the book ‘‘to come to the hands of men’’ 9 : at the outset,Vasari invokes the immemorial connection that placed the great historyof art (in the subjective genitive sense) under the Medici name;in this way, logically, the first history of art (in the objective genitivesense) placed itself under the same majestic aegis. This, moreover, iswhat is represented in the engraved frontispieces of the two successiveeditions, both of which are crowned by the celebrated Medici pale(Figs. 2 and 4).*effeuiller, to pull the petals off; but there is wordplay: feuille means ‘‘sheet of paper’’;feuilleter means ‘‘to flip through the pages of.’’