EXPRESSION, CHARACTERISATION 143 



interflowing lines is further strengthened by the distribution 

 of light and dark upon similar principles of balance. When 

 at length we view the picture finished on the painter's easel, 

 we see that colour has been managed upon fundamentally the 

 same principle. Only the greatest masters of the brush have 

 been able to combine perfect balance of form, perfect balance 

 of chiaroscuro, and perfect balance of colour in a single com- 

 position. Sculpturesque painters, like Michel Angelo, attend 

 principally to composition by lines, subordinating the play of 

 light and shadow, and tinting with parsimony or timidity. 

 Some of the less highly gifted Venetian painters, men like 

 Bonifazio, are contented with composition by colour, neglect- 

 ing the balance and grouping of their figures. Tintoretto, 

 who often seems careless about his linear design, obtains 

 the most striking effect of composition by his marvellously 

 powerful distribution of light and dark in counterbalancing 

 masses. Fra Bartolommeo and the Florentines in general 

 rely more than is desirable upon geometrical schemes of 

 linear composition, so that the pyramidal arrangement 

 assmues a kind of tyranny in their paintings. Rubens, with 

 his keen relish for nature, discards this mechanical assistance, 

 trusting to the life which plays so vigorously in each part of 

 his work. Few attain to the consummate artistic harmony 

 which characterises the best pictures of Andrea del Sarto. 

 He seems to deserve his title of ' faultless ' principally by 

 having known how to unite the three elements of composition 

 line, colour, chiaroscuro in reciprocally helpful harmony. 



The necessity for composition in art might be deduced not 

 only from the natural craving of the mind after symmetry 

 and rhythm, but also from art's relative incapacity to rival 

 nature. The model is in movement, the multitude is swaying 

 to and fro, the landscape varies with cloud-shadows and 

 changing atmospheric effects ; but statue and picture must 

 be stationary. They arrest the life of Nature at an instant ; 

 they select one suggestion from the multiplicity of her sugges- 

 tions ; they are symbols, and not copies of the object as it 

 meets our sensuous perception. Art is accordingly bound to 

 introduce an equivalent for what it cannot represent. Like 



