Taken from “Through the Eyes of the Masters”
by Flavio Caroli
History is not a procession to be watched from above, said the great Marc Bloch. And the historian is not a gentleman looking at the procession from his balcony in order to describe it with precision and objectivity.
The historian is a person like any other, who walks inside the procession and asks himself what has happened over the course of a long and difficult journey; what direction the procession has taken and where it is heading; ultimately – if possible – what the final meaning of this journey might be.
To carry out his investigations – while he keeps walking – he uses the few tools at his disposal. He asks his fellow travellers for information, who in turn ask others; some report the news they receive with a spirit of truth, others lie, putting forward facts that can confirm theses to which they are particularly attached.
In the end, the historian is alone and can rely on nothing but his own intelligence. First of all, he must sift through the sources; then he must find at least an empirical logic that has guided and still guides events. In short, he must build his own idea of what has happened and, as a consequence, reveal a possible meaning of his own existence and of the existence of the world.
On these ideas the philosophy of the most important historiographical school of our time was born and developed: the school of the “Annales”. It is a school where it is taken for granted that there is no absolute History, but rather different histories, and the most reliable of these are the ones shaped by the masters.
The same is true for a relatively young discipline (just over a century old): the history of art. The masters who have constructed the various histories of art are not many, and they were formed either by the Italian tradition or by the Central European tradition, which worked mainly in London around the Warburg Institute. Here we intend to compare some of the highest achievements of these explorations into “thought in images”.
And since the author of this book had the good fortune to live close to the masters in question, it will also be an opportunity to remember their humanity, which is certainly not separate from the greatness of their thought.