later nineteenth century, the entire world of the arts began to 
reach again for the iconic qualities of touch and sense interplay 
(synesthesia, as it was called) in poetry, as in painting. The 
German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand inspired Berenson’s 
remark that “the painter can accomplish his task only by giving 
tactile values to retinal impressions.” Such a program involves 
the endowing of each plastic form with a kind of nervous 
system of its own.

     The electric form of pervasive impression is profoundly 
tactile and organic, endowing each object with a kind of unified 
sensibility, as the cave painting had done. The unconscious 
task of the painter in the new electric age was to raise this fact 
to the level of conscious awareness. From this time on, the 
mere specialist in any field was doomed to the sterility and 
inanity that echoed an archaic form of the departing