Confronting Images

Contents   List of Illustrations Translator's Preface   Question Posed When we pose our gaze to an art image (1) Question posed to a tone of certainty (2) Question posed to a Kantian tone, to some magic words, and to the status of a knowledge (5) The very old requirement of figurability (7)   1. The History of Art Within the Limits of Its Simple Practice   Looking intently at a patch/whack of white wall: the visible, the legible, the visual, the virtual   The requirement of the visual, or how incarnation ""opens"" imitation   Where the discipline is wary of theory as of not-knowledge. The illusion of specificity, the illusion of exactitude, and the ""historian's blow""   Where the past screens the past. The indispensable find and the unthinkable loss. Where history and art come to impede the history of art   First platitude: art is over . . . since the existence of the history of art. Metaphysical trap and positivist trap   Second platitude: everything is visible . . . since art is dead   2. Art as Rebirth and the Immortality of the Ideal Man   Where art was invented as renascent from its ashes, and where the history of art invented itself along with it   The four legitimations of Vasari's Lives: obedience to the prince, the social body of art, the appeal to origins, and the appeal to ends   Where Vasari saves artists from oblivion and ""renames/renowns"" them in eterna fama.   The history of art as second religion, devoted to the immortality of ideal men   Metaphysical ends and courtly ends. Where the crack is closed in the ideal and realism: a magic writing-pad operation   The first three magic words: rinascita, imitazione, idea (89). The fourth magic word: disegno. Where art legitimates itself as unified object, noble practice, and intellectual knowledge. The metaphysics of Federico Zuccari. Where the history of art creates art in its own image   3. The History of Art Within the Limits of Its Simple Reason   The ends that Vasari bequeathed to us. Simple reason, or how discourse invents its object   Metamorphoses of the Vasarian thesis, emergences from the moment of antithesis: the Kantian tone adopted by the history of art   Where Erwin Panofsky develops the moment of antithesis and critique. How the visible takes on meaning. Interpretive violence   From antithesis to synthesis. Kantian ends, metaphysical ends. Synthesis as magical operation   First magic word: humanism. Where object of knowledge becomes form of knowledge.   Vasari as Kantian and Kant as humanist. Powers of consciousness and return to the ideal man   Second magic word: iconology. Return to Cesare Ripa. Visible, legible, invisible. The notion of iconological content as transcendental synthesis. Panofsky's retreat   Farther, too far: the idealist constraint. Third magic word: symbolic form. Where the sensible sign is absorbed by the intelligible. The pertinence of function, the idealism of ""functional unity""   From image to concept and from concept to image. Fourth magic word: schematism. The final unity of synthesis in representation. The image monogrammed, cut short, made ""pure."" A science of art under constraint to logic and metaphysics   4. The Image as Rend and the Death of God Incarnate   First approximation to renounce the schematism of the history of art: the rend. To open the image, to open logic   Where the dream-work smashes the box of representation. Work is not function. The power of the negative. Where resemblance works, plays, inverts, and dissembles. Where figuring equals disfiguring   Extent and limits of the dream paradigm. Seeing and looking. Where dream and symptom decenter the subject of knowledge   Second approximation to renounce the idealism of the history of art: the symptom.   Panofsky the metapsychologist? On questioning the denial of the symptom. There is no Panofskian unconscious   The Panofskian model of deduction faced with the Freudian paradigm of over-determination. The example of melancholy. Symbol and symptom. Constructed share, cursed share   Third approximation to renounce the iconographism of the history of art and the tyranny of imitation: the Incarnation. Flesh and body. The double economy: mimetic fabric and ""upholstery buttons."" The prototypical images of Christianity and the index of incarnation   For a history of symptomatic intensities. Some examples. Dissemblance and unction. Where figuring equals modifying figures equals disfiguring   Fourth approximation to renounce the humanism of the history of art: death. Resemblance as drama. Two medieval treatises facing Vasari: the rent subject facing the man of humanism. The history of art is a history of imbroglios   Resemblance to life, resemblance to death. The economy of death in Christianity: the ruse and the risk. Where death insists in the image. And us, before the image?     Appendix: The Detail and the Pan The aporia of the detail To paint or to depict The accident: material radiance The symptom: slippage of meaning Beyond the detail principle   Notes Index