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

Art as Rebirth 67deviations establish a relation rather than a not-relation. They areparodic only despite themselves. Fundamentally, they are quite serious,and we might hazard the suggestion that such a print, placed atboth exit and entry of the Lives, committed the whole to the questionof ends—the ends of our own history of art in the process of beinginvented. 25 In any case, we should not be surprised to find in the printof 1568 the two great types of ideals already posited in what I havecalled the legitimation procedures of Vasari’s text. Note in passing thesophistic character of the whole operation, which presents as legitimizingreasons what are in fact only rationales of desire. . . . Notealso how bringing an object to the fore (saving famous artists’ namesfrom oblivion) can efficaciously contribute to the new assumption ofa subject position (the art historian himself, as new humanist, asscholar of a new and specific kind).The first desire, then, the first ends invoked: they are metaphysicalends. We read them, in the engraved inscription, under the wordsnunquam periisse. We see them under the allegorical figure of ourwinged and female historian, who is called eterna fama, Eternal Renown.We recognize them in all the passages where Vasari appeals toan origin as to a final end. What constitutes itself here is nothing otherthan a second religion, a religion located in the field designated ‘‘Art.’’It foments its concept of immortality on the foundations of a glorifyinguse of memory—a memory put to work ‘‘bringing artists renown,’’sheltering them forever under the protective wing of eternafama. Immortality has here its messianic envoy, who weighs souls andpronounces the names of the elect: the art historian, whose era beginswith the untimely collapse of an objective genitive into a subjectivegenitive.The second ends of this fictive but efficacious era complete theimmortality with an aura of glory. Hos viros, says the inscription. ‘‘Thenobility and greatness of our art,’’ says the dedication to the eccellentiartefici miei. In short, the religion that Vasari invents is a religion ofclass—and even a religion of the first class. It concerns only the ‘‘finestspirits,’’ it being understood not only that the latter are entitled topostmortem ‘‘eternal renown’’ (eterna fama) but that nothing can