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
never painted a figure which has artistic existence. Their works have
value, if at all, as highly elaborate, very intelligible symbols,
capable, indeed, of communicating something, but losing all higher value
the moment the message is delivered.

Giotto's paintings, on the contrary, have not only as much power of
appealing to the tactile imagination as is possessed by the objects
represented--human figures in particular--but actually more, with the
necessary result that to his contemporaries they conveyed a _keener_
sense of reality, of life-likeness than the objects themselves! We whose
current knowledge of anatomy is greater, who expect more articulation
and suppleness in the human figure, who, in short, see much less naïvely
now than Giotto's contemporaries, no longer find his paintings more than