Art Encyclopedia - Tactile Value

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Tactile Value
Tactile value refers to plastic values. It is the illusion of tangibility in a painting. That which stimulates the imagination to apprehend in a physical way the plastic qualities of an object represented - its weight, mass, distance, texture, motion or stability, warmth or coolness.

Tactile value is a term coined by Bernard Berenson in his Florentine Painters of the Renaissance (1896) to describe those qualities in a painting that he regarded as stimulating the sense of touch. He thought that Giotto was the first master since classical antiquity whose painting demonstrated these qualities, which he considered to be a distinctive feature of Florentine painting and held to be ‘life enhancing’.