Michelangelo had a sense for the materially significant as great as Giotto's or Masaccio's, but he possessed means of rendering, inherited from Donatello, Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio and Leonardo,--means that had been undreamt of by Giotto or even by Masaccio. Add to this that he saw clearly what before him had been felt only dimly, that there was no other such instrument for conveying material significance 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]