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

66 Confronting Imagesthat our ambiguous angel—Dame Renown—still brings to mind aLast Judgment. Vasari had suggested that a three-belled trumpet beused as an allegorical motif in the funeral of Michelangelo. We find itagain here, drawing men out of the earth in a dramaturgy much moresuggestive of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (especially the story of Deucalionand Pyrrha) than of the Apocalypse of Saint John, with its imaginary ofluminous terrors . . .The men who emerge from the ground aremuscular, vigorous, and well pleasured. The bearded figure in theforeground, for example, has faunlike features and strikes a declamatorypose, characteristics that hardly suggest a sojourn in Christianity’sharrowing middle realm. There is a decisive departure fromChristian iconography of the Resurrection in the group of three ladiespersonifying the Arti del disegno, who preside over the scene as if itwere some pagan Last Judgment. They conspicuously take their attributesin hand—attributes that also hang near charming, fleshy puttion each side of the elaborate frame.Finally, there is the inscription: hac sospite nvnqvam / hos periisseviros, victos / avt morte fatebor. ‘‘This breath [the angel is apparentlyspeaking through his trumpet] will proclaim that these mennever perished and never were vanquished by death.’’ This inscriptionwas contrived by the humanist Vincenzo Borghini—Vasari’s mentorin all things literary—so as to evoke a passage from the Aeneid. 24 Itcalls for a few preemptive observations. Hos viros: ‘‘those men there,’’the ones who, before you and in limited numbers, emerge from oblivion.This is not the ‘‘all men’’ that, according to Christian teaching,will be resurrected en masse. These men constitute a special class, anelite ...an elite that has never perished (nunquam periisse). Strictlyspeaking, then, the elite is not being resurrected. It was only forgottenin the mental purgatory that was the Middle Ages. Today, at the outsetof Vasari’s Lives, it returns, ‘‘brought renown’’ by the trumpet ofeterna fama and by the pen of the historian-angel.Now we understand that this whole system of deviations put inplace by Vasari in counterpoint to one of the most loaded themes inChristian iconography—a Resurrection of sensual beings respondingto the call of an effeminate and worldly angel, under the gaze ofa Trinity of bare-breasted matrons—we understand that all of these