Painting

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.

What is a Naturalist? I venture upon the following definition:—A man with a native gift for science who has taken to art. His purpose is not to extract the material and spiritual significance of objects, thus communicating them to us more rapidly and intensely than we should perceive them ourselves, and thereby giving us a sense of heightened vitality; his purpose is research, and his communication consists of nothing but facts.

• Berlin.
  
  • 93. Sleeping Youth (terra-cotta).
  • 97a. Entombment (terra-cotta).
• Florence.
  
  • Bargello. David (bronze). Bust of Woman (marble).
  • Opera del Duomo. Decapitation of Baptist (silver relief).
    

Verrocchio was, among Florentines at least, the first to feel that a faithful reproduction of the contours is not landscape, that the painting of nature is an art distinct from the painting of the figure. He scarcely knew where the difference lay, but felt that light and atmosphere play an entirely different part in each, and that in landscape these have at least as much importance as tactile values.

• Assisi.
  
  • S. Francesco, Upper Church. XX-XXV and first of Frescoes recounting the Life of St. Francis, done perhaps under Giotto’s directions. XXVI-XXVIII of same series done more upon his own responsibility.
    
    • Lower Church, Chapel of the Sacrament. Frescoes: Legend of St. Nicholas; Christ with SS. Francis and Nicholas and Donors, etc. (?). Before 1316. Madonna between SS. Francis and Nicholas (?).
      

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.