the Gutenberg take-off. Throughout the centuries of 
manuscript culture it will appear that the visual did not become 
quite dissociated from tactility, even though it diminished the 
auditory empire drastically. This matter will get separate 
discussion apropos of medieval reading habits. The relation of 
tactility to the visual, so necessary to an understanding of the 
fortunes of the phonetic alphabet, only became starkly defined 
after Cézanne. Thus Gombrich makes tactility a central theme 
of Art and Illusion , as does Heinrich Wolfflin in his Principles of  
Art History . And the reason for this new stress was that in an 
age of photography the divorce of the visual from the interplay 
of the other senses was pushed all the way into reaction. 
Gombrich records the stages of nineteenth-century discussion 
and analysis of “sense data” leading to the Helmholtz case for 
“unconscious inference” or mental action even in the most 
basic sense experience. “Tactility” or interplay among all the