Drawing Adam's navel: the problem of disegno as creative tension between the visible and knowledgeable

摘要

Ernest Gellner, in his discussions on nationalism, remarked that the existence or not of Adam's navel might end the riddle between creationism and Darwinian evolution. A similar riddle existed in the Renaissance: does visual creation follow nature or is it created in the mind? Joseph Meder commented,'[...] the concept of disegno was a great theme for the hair splitting intellectuals of the late Renaissance'. This hair splitting is largely lost in the translation of disegno into the separate ideas of practical drawing and intentional design in the Anglophone world. Lucy Gent has identified this as occurring as early as 1598 with the English translation of Lomazzo's Trattato by Richard Haydocke. Baxandall's study of the Anglophone anxiety with the polysemic nature of disegno records some interference with the French notion of dessein; further he concludes that its closest translation should have been 'draught'.' The French notion of dessein, though, is also similarly semantically disjunctive as it is in the German.But the two Italianate semantic senses meet simultaneously in disegno and they are distinguished in contextual usage.