Bricklayer as renderer (Y1,1, pt. 4)

The passage seems to jump back in time, referencing toward its end, once again, the "bricklayer-painter," that older artisanal form, pointing out that they only "render" the "material." How does one explain this recurrence, however, which seems to ask for some way to fit it into the overall movement of the passage? One way is to view the "bricklayer-painter" as Benjamin himself, the Arcades Project nothing more than a piling of brick on brick, mortar of space and thought between each, Benjamin applying himself "to the material part," artisanally, in a painterly way, visually "rendering" the world. Here to imagine the bricklayer as painter is one of the funnier moments in the Arcades Project: what kind of rendering is a bricklayer going to do? Citation and commentary as text, material, that renders something else, but only as much as a brick might do so? Is this the status of painting, the embarrassment in the face of the detailed rendering the camera might bring? And if this is the status of painting, what kind of world is it even capable of imagining, where of course it can only conceive of its own returning to power? What kind of power? And if all this is as we can imagine perfectly defunct, what sort of power will technology take?