FIFTH LECTURE. COMPOSITION, EXPRESSION. ΠΟΛΛΑ Δ' ΕΝ ΚΑΡΔΙΑΙΣ ΑΝΔΡΩΝ ΕΒΑΛΟΝ ὩΡΑΙ ΠΟΛΥΑΝΘΕΜΟΙ ΑΡ ΧΑΙΑ ΣΟΦΙΣΜΑΘ'. ἉΠΑΝ Δ' ΕΥΡΟΝΤΟΣ ΕΡΓΟΝ. ΠΙΝΔΑΡ. ΟΛΥΜΠ. Π. ARGUMENT. Elements of Composition; Grouping; M. Agnolo; Correggio; Raffaello; Breadth;--Expression; its Classes, its Limits. FIFTH LECTURE. Invention is followed by Composition. Composition, in its stricter sense, is the dresser of Invention, it superintends the disposition of its materials. Composition has physical and moral elements: those are Perspective and Light with shade; these, Unity, Propriety and Perspicuity; without Unity it cannot span its subject; without Propriety it cannot tell the story; without Perspicuity it clouds the fact with confusion; destitute of light and shade it misses the effect, and heedless of perspective it cannot find a place. Composition, like all other parts of style, had a gradual progress; it began in monotony and apposition, emerged to centre and depth, established itself on harmony and masses, was debauched by contrast and by grouping, and finally supplanted by machinery, common-place, and manner. Of sculpture, as infant painting had borrowed its first theory of forms, so it probably borrowed its method of arranging them; and this is Apposition, a collateral arrangement of figures necessary for telling a single or the scattered moments of a fact. If statuary indulged in the combination of numerous groups, such as those of the Niobe, it might dispose them in composition, it might fix a centre and its rays, and so produce an illusion as far as colourless form is capable of giving it. But sculpture, when it was first consulted by painting, was not yet arrived at that period which allowed the display of such magnificence; a single figure or a single group could not sufficiently inform the painter; he was reduced to consult basso-relievo, and of that, Apposition is the element.