and whatever is in the actuality enjoyable, he allows us to enjoy at our leisure.  In words already familiar to us, he extracts the significance of movements, just as, in rendering tactile values, the artist extracts the corporeal significance of objects.  His task is, however, far more difficult, although less indispensable:—­it is not enough that he should extract the values of what at any given moment is an actuality, as is an object, but what at no moment really is—­namely movement.  He can accomplish his task in only one way, and that is by so rendering the one particular movement that we shall be able to realise all other movements that the same figure may make.  “He is grappling with his enemy now,” I say of my wrestler.  “What a pleasure to be able to realise in my own muscles, on my own chest, with my own arms and legs, the life that is in him as he is making his supreme effort!  What a pleasure, as I look away from the representation, to realise in the same manner, how after the contest his muscles will relax, and rest trickle like a refreshing stream through his nerves!” All this I shall be made to enjoy by the artist who, in representing any one movement, can give me the logical sequence of visible strain and pressure in the parts and muscles.

It is just here that the scientific spirit of the Florentine naturalists was of immense service to art.  This logic of sequence is to be attained only by great, although not necessarily more than empiric, knowledge of anatomy, such perhaps as the artist pure would never be inclined to work out for himself, but just such as would be of absorbing interest to those scientists by temperament and artists by profession whom we have in Pollaiuolo and, to a less extent, in Verrocchio.  We remember how Giotto contrived to render tactile values.  Of all the possible outlines, of all the possible variations of light and shade that a figure may have, he selected those that we must isolate for special attention when we are actually realising it.  If instead of figure, we say figure in movement, the same statement applies to the way Pollaiuolo rendered movement—­with this difference, however, that he had to render what in actuality we never can perfectly isolate, the line and light and shade most significant of any given action.  This the artist must construct himself out of his dramatic feeling for pressure and strain and his ability to articulate the figure in all its logical sequences, for, if he would convey a sense of movement, he must give the line and the light and shade which will best render not tactile values alone, but the sequences of articulations.

[Page heading:  “BATTLE OF THE NUDES”]