piest moments is an unparalleled power of
perfectly combining values of touch with values of movement.

Look, for instance, at Botticelli's "Venus Rising from the Sea."
Throughout, the tactile imagination is roused to a keen activity, by
itself almost as life heightening as music. But the power of music is
even surpassed where, as in the goddess' mane-like tresses of hair
fluttering to the wind, not in disorderly rout but in masses yielding
only after resistance, the movement is directly life-communicating. The
entire picture presents us with the quintessence of all that is
pleasurable to our imagination of touch and of movement. How we revel in
the force and freshness of the wind, in the life of the wave! And such
an appeal he always makes. His subject may be fanciful, as in the "Realm
of Venus" (the "Spring"); religious, as in the Sixtine Chapel frescoes
or in the "Coronation of the Virgin"; political, as in the recently
discovered "Pallas Taming a Centaur"; or even crudely allegorical, as in
the Louvre frescoes,--no matter how unpropitious, how abstract the idea,
the vivid appeal to our tactile sense, the life-communicating movement
is always there. Indeed, at times it seems that the less artistic the
theme, the more artistic the fulfilment, the painter being impelled to
give the utmost values of touch and movement to just those figures which
are liable to be read off as mere empty symbols. Thus, on the figure
representing political disorder--the Centaur--in the "Pallas,"
Botticelli has lavished his most intimate gifts. He constructs the torso
and flanks in such a way that every line, every indentation, every boss
appeals so vividly to the sense of touch that our fingers feel as if
they had everywhere been in contact with his body, while his face gives
to a still heightened degree this convincing sense of reality, every
line functioning perfectly for the osseous structure of brow, nose, and
cheeks. As to the hair--imagine shapes having the supreme life of line
you may see in the contours of licking flames, and yet possessed of all
the plasticity of something which caresses the hand that models it to
its own desire!

[Page heading: LINEAL DECORATION]

In fact, the mere subject, and even representation in general, was so
indifferent to Botticelli, that he appears almost as if haunted by the
idea of communicating the _unembodied_ values of touch and movement. Now
there is a way of rendering even tactile values with al