affecting Renaissance sensibility. But his entire book is a valid 
companion for the student of the Gutenberg revolution. He 
does note (p. 6) of this period that “it craved the super-human 
instead of the supernatural, as witness the paintings of 
Michaelangelo; and it took pleasure in the enormous rather 
than in the great, as witness the statues of St. John Lateran 
with their hysterical gesticulations, and the tomb of Alexander 
VII in St. Peter’s.”

     Print as an immediate technological extension of the 
human person gave its first age an unprecedented access of 
power and vehemence. Visually, print is very much more “high 
definition” than manuscript. Print was, that is to say, a very 
“hot” medium coming into a world that for thousands of years 
had been served by the “cool” medium of script. Thus our own 
“roaring twenties” were the first to feel the hot movie medium