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

68 Confronting Images‘‘prevent their energies from attaining to the highest rank ...inorderto live in honor’’ (pervenire a’sommi gradi . . . per vivere onorati). 26Although of humble birth, excellent artists—‘‘brought renown’’ byhistorians—will have membership rights in the ideal but concrete nobiltà,in other words in princely courts. We mustn’t forget the grandducalcrown and the Medici pale that align precisely with the trumpetsof Renown. So the second ends of Vasarian history can be describedas courtly ends. 27The history of art, then, will be born or ‘‘reborn’’ by inventing anew human species: an elite, a nobility not of blood but of virtù. Itwill have formed something like an ideal humanity, a Parnassus ofresurrected demigods, sharing with the prince the sommi gradi of sociallife—such are its courtly ends 28 —sharing as well with the true Godthat faculty of invention and formal creation that Vasari called disegno—andhere we touch upon the specifically metaphysical dimensionsof his project. But isn’t this a bit exaggerated? Can it really bemaintained that disegno, drawing,* is a concept with metaphysicalovertones? By according such prominence to ends, aren’t we missingthe main thing, which is quite simply the constitution by Vasari of anew historical knowledge, with its finds and its potential for error,with its methods of enquiry and its specific object?Today, art historians are reluctant to see in Vasari a systematicthinker, much less a metaphysician. Sometimes they emphasize thesuperficiality of his thought. 29 Sometimes they question the very existenceof a Vasarian doctrine. 30 Some of them insist—rightly—on thelack of closure in his book, conceived over the course of several decadesand unstable, its inflections changing from one edition to theother. 31 Erwin Panofsky had already set into relief, pertinently, theinternal contradiction of Vasari’s conception of historicity, which aimsfor synthesis but at the same time effectively precludes it. The famous‘‘theory of evolution’’ or ‘‘law of the three stages,’’ the biological metaphoraround which the whole of Vasari’s text is organized (the threestages are likened to childhood, adolescence, and maturity), a theoryheir to a mixture of ancient and Christian dogmas, is ‘‘fraught with*dessin, which can also mean ‘‘design.’’