200
PARTISAN REVIEW
a solid crust during the Middle Ages, was here dented, pierced and
vaporized. Bodies were inserted and, against resisting pressure,
as
on reluctant hinges, pivoted into depth. There is in U ccello's work a
tensity which springs directly from his craving to know how bodies
will behave in the
terra incognita
known as the third dimension. And
the reports of his discoveries, such as the bold foreshortenings in "The
Battle of San Romano," are proclaimed in tense and urgent gestures.
And what is true of perspective applies equally to anatomy. The
gulf
that separates a Pollaiuolo nude from one by Bouguereau is not
all
a matter of significant design. The one was born of nature's union
with an avid sensibility; the other makes a parade of a habitual
skill. One says, pointing to the array of anatomic facts-"Here lies
the mystery"; the other says-"Here lies no mystery, I know it
all."
The modern critic who belittles all representational concerns,
because he sees them only as solved problems, underrates their power
to inflame the artist's mind and to intensify his vision and his touch.
He will fail of appreciation if he cannot appropriate the artist's will
to state his concept of reality. Nor need he know how much of ana–
tomic ignorance prevailed in Pollaiuolo's time to judge the measure
of the artist's revelation. For Pollaiuolo's effort to articulate each
muscular inflection is permanently sealed in the form. Like all works
connected with discoveries of representation, his pictures lack the
sweet ease of accomplishment. His images are ever aborning, swelling
into space and taking life, like frozen fingers tingling as they warm.
It is not facts they purvey; it is the thrill and wonder of cognition.
But is this sort of cognition relevant to aesthetic value? To
be
sure it is. We are told that the artist's design seeks to impose enduring
unity and order on the undifferentiated content of experience. To
bring
his
organizing powers into fullest play, the painter must haul
his perceptions out of their limbo and annex them to his plan. A
Michelangelo, busying himself in anatomic studies, knows that the
apparent turbulence of a man's muscles must become in his design
as inevitably ordered as was the long, unswerving contour of Masac–
cio. A score of muscles newly differentiated, a new vocabulary of
expressive gesture, a newly seen relation between motion and shape,
these become part of that living diversity to which unification is the
victorious response. They are the stuff of the aesthetic program. And
in bringing novel visual experiences to his art, Michelangelo, so far
