ps as wholes, and of their landscape
surroundings--by preference, hills so shaped as readily to stimulate the
tactile imagination. For what he accomplished in the nude and in
movement, we have his "Expulsion" and his "Man Trembling with Cold" to
witness. But in his works neither landscape nor movement, nor the nude,
are as yet distinct sources of artistic pleasure--that is to say, in
themselves life-enhancing. Although we can well leave the nude until we
come to Michelangelo, who was the first to completely realise its
distinctly artistic possibilities, we cannot so well dispense with an
enquiry into the sources of our aesthetic pleasure in the representation
of movement and of landscape, as it was in these two directions--in
movement by Pollaiuolo especially, and in landscape by Baldovinetti,
Pollaiuolo, and Verrocchio--that the great advances of this generation
of Florentine painters were made.
VIII.
[Page heading: REPRESENTATION OF MOVEMENT]
Turning our attention first to movement--which, by the way, is not the
same as motion, mere change of place--we find that we realise it just as
we realise objects, by the stimulation of our tactile imagination, only
that here touch retires to a second place before the muscular feelings
of varying pressure and strain. I see (to take an example) two men
wrestling, but unless my retinal impressions are immediately translated
into images of strain and pressure in my muscles, of resistance to my
weight, of touch all over my body, it means nothing to me in terms of
vivid experience--not more, perhaps, than if I heard some one say "Two
men are wrestling." Although a wrestling match may, in fact, contain
many genuinely artistic elements, our enjoyment of it can never be quite
artistic; we are prevented from completely realising it not only by our
dramatic interest in the game, but also, granting the possibility of
being devoid of dramatic interest, by the succession of movements being
too rapid for us to realise each completely, and too fatiguing, even if
realisable. Now if a way could be found of conveying to us the
realisation of movement without the confusion and the fatigue of the
actuality, we should be getting out of the wrestlers more than they
themselves can give us--the heightening of vitality which comes to us
whenever we keenly realise life, such as the actuality itself would give
us, _plus_ the greater effectiveness of the heightening brought about by
the clearer, int
|