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

72 Confronting Imagesknowledge, a constructed ideal, an assured prestige. Each helping todeny the crack between knowledge and truth, to redesign them as aunity on the surface of the Wunderblock. In this respect, Vasari’s ‘‘design’’*is akin to a magical operation: words are summoned up tomend the opening—the very words that would become, beyond theLives, the totem-notions of the whole of the history of art. Thus dowe find rinascità, a totem-word reinvented and reinvested to declinethe meaning of modern history; thus do we find disegno, a totem-wordreinvented and reinvested to decline the final, synchronic meaning ofartistic activity in general understood as imitation. It is thanks to sucha magical operation that the expression ‘‘history of art,’’ in its mostradical sense, could be pronounced in Vasari: rinascità del disegno. 42Rinascità, as we saw, is what gives meaning to the institution of anage susceptible of being named the absolute age of the history of art.Convinced that he belonged to an era when the history of art (in thesubjective genitive sense) had attained its highest degree of perfection,Vasari invented for us the history of art (in the objective genitivesense) in order to provide a detailed account, retrospectively, of the‘‘progress of its rebirth’’ (il progresso della sua rinascità) as a successionof three ages (età), each of which corresponded metaphorically to astage of human life and commenced roughly with the beginning of anew century. Around 1260 the child was reborn; around 1400 wereconstituted the vigor of geniuses and the explicit statement of veritable‘‘rules of art’’; around 1500 the great masters brought the statementto triumphal action by using the rules with the utmostfreedom. 43 It must be repeated here that the history of art (the discipline)was born with the idea of a progress—progresso or augmento,according to the terms used by Vasari himself—a progress that thehistory of art (the practice) supposedly demonstrated beginning withthat proto-hero of the Renaissance who was the painter Giotto:That very obligation which the craftsmen of painting owe tonature, who serves continually as model [esempio] to those*dessein.