The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance | Page 2

none could they say, "This will perfectly convey my meaning."
Painting, therefore, offers but a partial and not always the most
adequate manifestation of their personality, and we feel the artist as
greater than his work, and the man as soaring above the artist.

[Page heading: MANYSIDEDNESS OF THE PAINTERS]
The immense superiority of the artist even to his greatest achievement
in any one art form, means that his personality was but slightly
determined by the particular art in question, that he tended to mould it
rather than let it shape him. It would be absurd, therefore, to treat the
Florentine painter as a mere link between two points in a necessary
evolution. The history of the art of Florence never can be, as that of
Venice, the study of a placid development. Each man of genius brought
to bear upon his art a great intellect, which, never condescending
merely to please, was tirelessly striving to reincarnate what it
comprehended of life in forms that would fitly convey it to others; and
in this endeavour each man of genius was necessarily compelled to
create forms essentially his own. But because Florentine painting was
pre-eminently an art formed by great personalities, it grappled with
problems of the highest interest, and offered solutions that can never
lose their value. What they aimed at, and what they attained, is the
subject of the following essay.
II.
The first of the great personalities in Florentine painting was Giotto.
Although he affords no exception to the rule that the great Florentines
exploited all the arts in the endeavour to express themselves, he, Giotto,
renowned as architect and sculptor, reputed as wit and versifier,
differed from most of his Tuscan successors in having peculiar aptitude
for the essential in painting as an art.
But before we can appreciate his real value, we must come to an
agreement as to what in the art of figure-painting--the craft has its own
altogether diverse laws--is the essential; for figure-painting, we may
say at once, was not only the one pre-occupation of Giotto, but the
dominant interest of the entire Florentine school.
[Page heading: IMAGINATION OF TOUCH]
Psychology has ascertained that sight alone gives us no accurate sense
of the third dimension. In our infancy, long before we are conscious of

the process, the sense of touch, helped on by muscular sensations of
movement, teaches us to appreciate depth, the third dimension, both in
objects and in space.
In the same unconscious years we learn to make of touch, of the third
dimension, the test of reality. The child is still dimly aware of the
intimate connection between touch and the third dimension. He cannot
persuade himself of the unreality of Looking-Glass Land until he has
touched the back of the mirror. Later, we entirely forget the connection,
although it remains true, that every time our eyes recognise reality, we
are, as a matter of fact, giving tactile values to retinal impressions.
Now, painting is an art which aims at giving an abiding impression of
artistic reality with only two dimensions. The painter must, therefore,
do consciously what we all do unconsciously,--construct his third
dimension. And he can accomplish his task only as we accomplish ours,
by giving tactile values to retinal impressions. His first business,
therefore, is to rouse the tactile sense, for I must have the illusion of
being able to touch a figure, I must have the illusion of varying
muscular sensations inside my palm and fingers corresponding to the
various projections of this figure, before I shall take it for granted as
real, and let it affect me lastingly.
It follows that the essential in the art of painting--as distinguished from
the art of colouring, I beg the reader to observe--is somehow to
stimulate our consciousness of tactile values, so that the picture shall
have at least as much power as the object represented, to appeal to our
tactile imagination.
[Page heading: GIOTTO]
Well, it was of the power to stimulate the tactile consciousness--of the
essential, as I have ventured to call it, in the art of painting--that Giotto
was supreme master. This is his everlasting claim to greatness, and it is
this which will make him a source of highest æsthetic delight for a
period at least as long as decipherable traces of his handiwork remain
on mouldering panel or crumbling wall. For great though he was as a
poet, enthralling as a story-teller, splendid and majestic as a composer,

he was in these qualities superior in degree only, to many of the
masters who painted in various parts of Europe during the thousand
years that intervened between the decline of antique, and the birth, in
his own person, of modern painting. But none of these masters had the
power to stimulate the tactile imagination, and, consequently, they