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