The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance | Page 4

the psychical process of recognition goes forward with the
unusual intensity of 4 to 2, overwhelms them with the sense of having
twice the capacity they had credited themselves with: their whole
personality is enhanced, and, being aware that this enhancement is
connected with the object in question, they for some time after take not
only an increased interest in it, but continue to realise it with the new
intensity. Precisely this is what form does in painting: it lends a higher
coefficient of reality to the object represented, with the consequent
enjoyment of accelerated psychical processes, and the exhilarating
sense of increased capacity in the observer. (Hence, by the way, the
greater pleasure we take in the object painted than in itself.)
And it happens thus. We remember that to realise form we must give
tactile values to retinal sensations. Ordinarily we have considerable
difficulty in skimming off these tactile values, and by the time they
have reached our consciousness, they have lost much of their strength.
Obviously, the artist who gives us these values more rapidly than the
object itself gives them, gives us the pleasures consequent upon a more
vivid realisation of the object, and the further pleasures that come from
the sense of greater psychical capacity.
Furthermore, the stimulation of our tactile imagination awakens our
consciousness of the importance of the tactile sense in our physical and
mental functioning, and thus, again, by making us feel better provided
for life than we were aware of being, gives us a heightened sense of
capacity. And this brings us back once more to the statement that the
chief business of the figure painter, as an artist, is to stimulate the
tactile imagination.
The proportions of this small book forbid me to develop further a
theme, the adequate treatment of which would require more than the
entire space at my command. I must be satisfied with the crude and
unillumined exposition given already, allowing myself this further

word only, that I do not mean to imply that we get no pleasure from a
picture except the tactile satisfaction. On the contrary, we get much
pleasure from composition, more from colour, and perhaps more still
from movement, to say nothing of all the possible associative pleasures
for which every work of art is the occasion. What I do wish to say is
that unless it satisfies our tactile imagination, a picture will not exert
the fascination of an ever-heightened reality; first we shall exhaust its
ideas, and then its power of appealing to our emotions, and its "beauty"
will not seem more significant at the thousandth look than at the first.
My need of dwelling upon this subject at all, I must repeat, arises from
the fact that although this principle is important indeed in other schools,
it is all-important in the Florentine school. Without its due appreciation
it would be impossible to do justice to Florentine painting. We should
lose ourselves in admiration of its "teaching," or perchance of its
historical importance--as if historical importance were synonymous
with artistic significance!--but we should never realise what artistic
idea haunted the minds of its great men, and never understand why at a
date so early it became academic.
[Page heading: GIOTTO AND VALUES OF TOUCH]
Let us now turn back to Giotto and see in what way he fulfils the first
condition of painting as an art, which condition, as we agreed, is
somehow to stimulate our tactile imagination. We shall understand this
without difficulty if we cover with the same glance two pictures of
nearly the same subject that hang side by side in the Florence Academy,
one by "Cimabue," and the other by Giotto. The difference is striking,
but it does not consist so much in a difference of pattern and types, as
of realisation. In the "Cimabue" we patiently decipher the lines and
colours, and we conclude at last that they were intended to represent a
woman seated, men and angels standing by or kneeling. To recognise
these representations we have had to make many times the effort that
the actual objects would have required, and in consequence our feeling
of capacity has not only not been confirmed, but actually put in
question. With what sense of relief, of rapidly rising vitality, we turn to
the Giotto! Our eyes scarcely have had time to light on it before we

realise it completely--the throne occupying a real space, the Virgin
satisfactorily seated upon it, the angels grouped in rows about it. Our
tactile imagination is put to play immediately. Our palms and fingers
accompany our eyes much more quickly than in presence of real
objects, the sensations varying constantly with the various projections
represented, as of face, torso, knees; confirming in every way our
feeling of capacity for coping with things,--for