To the notion of progress in the history of art, Bandelaire opposes a monadological conception. ‘Transferred into the sphere of the imagination…the idea of progress looms up with gigantic absurdity…. In the poetic and artistic order, inventors rarely have predecessors. Every flowering is spontaneous, individual. Was Signorelli really the begetter of Michelangelo? Did Perugino contain Raphael? The artist depends on himself alone. He can promise notlling to future centuries except his own works!’ Ch. B., Oeuvres, vol. 2, p. 149 (“Exposition Universelle, 1855”). [J38a,7] — Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), 298.