Looking at the bodies they depicted, we have the "illusion of being able to touch a figure". Presumably, he means that the bodies in Florentine painting are made of simple rounded volumes, and have surfaces that suggest some hard, dry material – something you could run your finger over, something you could tap. This cluster of lumps is another fact of the facial landscape, like the wart on the brow, the eyelids. With a finely graded moulding of light and shade, with a smooth, dry skin of paint, he makes the protuberances and crevices something you could touch. Here is the hand that might reach up and stroke the blob – the hand that carries our own desire to touch it.

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