(_β_) What we have in the first instance now to pass in review are the particular lines[312] that pictorial _composition_ is constrained to adhere to in its productions when presenting to us a definite situation and the more immediate motives referable to it by virtue of the way it concentrates and groups together various figures and natural objects in one self-exclusive whole.
(_αα_) What is of fundamental and pre-eminent importance here is the happy selection of a situation adapted to the art.
In this respect the imaginative powers of the painter possess an immeasurable field to select from, a field whose limits extend from the simplest situation[313] of an object insignificant in itself, such as a wreath of flowers, or a wineglass composed with plates, bread, and certain fruits, to rich compositions of important public events, political actions, coronation fêtes, battles, or even the Last Judgment, in which God the Father, Christ, his apostles, the heavenly legions, nay, our entire humanity, and earth, heaven, and hell are brought together. And here a closer inspection will show us that we must clearly distinguish what is truly pictorial on the one hand from that which is sculpturesque, and on the other from what is poetical in the sense that it is only poetry that can fully express it.
The essential difference between a _pictorial_, and _sculpturesque_ situation consists, as we have already seen, in this, that the main function of sculpture is to place before us that which is self-subsistent in its tranquillity, without conflict under conditions that do not affect it, in which distinctness of definition is not the main demand, it is only in the relief that it really begins to approach a group composition, and an epic expanse of figures begins to represent actions involving motion, and which imply collision of opposing forces. The art of painting, on the contrary, only thoroughly takes up its proper task, when it moves away from figures composed independently of their more concrete relations, moves away from a situation that is deficient in its elaboration, in order that it may thus pass into the sphere of living movement, human conditions, passions, conflicts, actions in persistent association with external environment, and even in its composition of natural landscape is able to retain firmly this definite structure of a given situation and its most lifelike individuality. It was for this reason that from the first we maintained that painting was called upon to effect the exposition of character, soul, and ideal qualities, not in the way that this spiritual world enables us to recognize it directly in its external shape, but in the way it evolves and expresses its actual substance by means of _actions._