ZÄK 60/1 · 2015 Two Regimes of Fact By Kamini Vellodi The fact is a feature of art historical study so ubiquitous that it is rarely called into question. But what is a fact? Why does art history rely on facts, and what form does this reliance take? What might be the problems raised by such reliance? How do works of art implicate facts, if at all? And in what ways might philosophy’s inter- rogation of the fact ofer lines of enquiry for art history’s address of this insistent feature of its practice? In this paper I will address such issues, drawing on the philos- ophy of Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze’s philosophy ofers as yet little explored conceptual potentials for art history. His problematisation of the fact provides a singular axis for exploring these potentials, whilst afording an opportunity for critical relection on this most common-sensical and seemingly benign of notions. Art History and Facts In the closing pages of his text on the painter Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze remarks that “it was with Michelangelo, with Mannerism, that the Figure or the pictorial fact was born in its pure state” 1 . This strange notion of a “pictorial fact”, which Deleuze also refers to as a “matter of fact”, bears rami icat ions not only for a phi- losophy of painting (rami icat ions which Deleuze carefully lays out in this text), but also for art history, as a discipline which takes works of art as its object and, by its own admission, consistently foregrounds facts. I was struck by the force of this disciplinary admission in a recent perusal of an article on the painter Jacopo Tintoretto. Here, the two authors reiterate a remark made by the late Detlev von Hadeln in 1923 that, “before anything else”, including “aesthetic arguments”, “a solid foundation” must be built through an “investiga- tion of the facts of the case”, and that without such facts, “the work on this subject (Tintoretto) will never come to an end” 2 . A couple of things might be noted about this apparently common-sensical avocation: irstly, the call for foundat ion, and 1 Gilles Deleuze: Francis Bacon – The Logic of Sensation [1981], transl. by Daniel W. Smith, London/New York 2003, 161. Deleuze takes the notion of the pictorial fact from Luciano Bel- losi (Michelangelo – The Painter, transl. by Pearl Sanders, New York 1971), who claims that Mi- chelangelo “destroys the narrative religious fact in favour of the properly pictorial or sculptural fact.” Deleuze: Francis Bacon, 196, n. 13. 2 Detlev Freiherr von Hadeln: Review of Erich von der Bercken and August L. Mayer: Jacopo Tintoretto 2 volumes, Munich 1923, in: The Burlington Magazine 43 (1923), 198-199; Robert Echols and Frederick Ilchman: Towards a New Tintoretto Catalogue, with a Checklist of Revised Attributions and a New Chronology, in: Jacopo Tintoretto – Actas del Congreso Internacional Jacopo Tintoretto/Pro- ceedings of the International Symposium Jacopo Tintoretto, Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007, a cargo de Miguel Falomir, Madrid 2009, 91-150, 91.