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

70 Confronting Imagesimagines here a gigantic mannerist Wunderblock, a magic writing padcompletely covered with glorious, completely designed motifs—whilewithin, the wax continues to retain traces of every erasure, of everyalteration and rectification.This crack is, fundamentally, what separates knowledge from truth. 34Vasari constituted a treasure-house of knowledge, but he wove all thisknowledge together with the thread of plausibility, which, it shouldbe clear, has but little in common with truth. Vasari, then, ‘‘designed’’*—desiredand represented to us—a grand plausible history,one that sutured in advance all the cracks and implausibilities of thetrue history. And that is why we read the Lives with so much pleasure:the history of art unfolds there like a family saga in installments, inwhich the wicked finally die for good (the Middle Ages) and the goodare resurrected for real, ‘‘for the truth’’ (the Renaissance) ...Hencethe difficulty of distinguishing events from rhetorical topoi. Hence theperpetual obfuscation of concrete observations by the global idea thatguides the unwinding plot lines. Hence the instability of Vasari’s lexicon,which constantly plays on several registers at once. It was necessaryin any case to construct a narrative that had a meaning, a sense,which is to say a direction and an end—here we reencounter themetaphysical aspect of Vasari’s evolutionism—but likewise a narrativethat would be readable by (legible to) the prince, that would be efficaciousand self-glorifying for all the artefici del disegno—and we rediscoverthe essential rhetorical tenor of this (of our) history of art in theprocess of being invented. 35There was, however, no lack, in the fifteenth century as in thesixteenth, of voices proclaiming high and wide the essential importanceof the realist criterion in the constitution of historical knowledge.Leonardo Bruni, then Vincenzo Borghini and Giambattista Adriani allproclaimed their hostility to literary fantasy: they firmly distinguishedl’ufficio del Poeta da quel dello Istorico. 36 Surviving correspondence betweenVasari and Vincenzo Borghini attests to this. Covering the years1546–74, this correspondence makes it possible for us to assess theinfluence of the ‘‘realist’’ notions of the Florentine scholar on the*dessiné.