ignificance as the human
nude. This fact is as closely dependent on the general conditions of
realising objects as tactile values are on the psychology of sight. We
realise objects when we perfectly translate them into terms of our own
states, our own feelings. So obviously true is this, that even the least
poetically inclined among us, because we keenly realise the movement of
a railway train, to take one example out of millions, speak of it as
_going_ or _running_, instead of _rolling on its wheels_, thus being no
less guilty of anthropomorphising than the most unregenerate savages. Of
this same fallacy we are guilty every time we think of anything
whatsoever with the least warmth--we are lending this thing some human
attributes. The more we endow it with human attributes, the less we
merely know it, the more we realise it, the more does it approach the
work of art. Now there is one and only one object in the visible
universe which we need not anthropomorphise to realise--and that is man
himself. His movements, his actions, are the only things we realise
without any myth-making effort--directly. Hence, there is no visible
object of such artistic possibilities as the human body; nothing with
which we are so familiar; nothing, therefore, in which we so rapidly
perceive changes; nothing, then, which if represented so as to be
realised more quickly and vividly than in life, will produce its effect
with such velocity and power, and so strongly confirm our sense of
capacity for living.

[Page heading: VALUE OF THE NUDE IN ART]

Values of touch and movement, we remember, are the specifically artistic
qualities in figure painting (at least, as practised by the
Florentines), for it is through them chiefly that painting directly
heightens life. Now while it remains true that tactile values can, as
Giotto and Masaccio have forever established, be admirably rendered on
the draped figure, yet drapery is a hindrance, and, at the best, only a
way out of a difficulty, for we _feel_ it masking the really
significant, which is _the form underneath_. A mere painter, one who is
satisfied to reproduce what everybody sees, and to paint for the fun of
painting, will scarcely comprehend this feeling. His only significant is
the obvious--in a figure, the face and the clothing, as in most of the
portraits manufactured nowadays. The artist, even when compelled to
paint draped figures, will force the drapery to render the nude, in
other words