it is true, and yet does not express that positive quality, that
WILL not to act, of the rapt contemplation. The landscape
uncomposed is negative, and it demands unity. Its type of
composition, then, must give it something positive besides
unity. It lacks both concentration and action; but it can gain
them both from a space composition which shall combine unity
with a tendency to movement. And this is given by the diagonal
and V-shaped type. This type merely allows free play to the
natural tendency of the "active" picture; but it constrains the
neutral, inanimate landscape. The shape itself imparts motion
to the picture: the sweep of line, the concentration of the
vista, the unifying power of the inverted triangle between two
masses, act, as it were, externally to the suggestion of the
object itself. There is always enough quiet in a landscape,--
the overwhelming suggestion of the horizontal suffices for
that; it is movement that is needed for richness of effect, and,
as I have shown, no type imparts the feeling of movement so
strongly as the diagonal and V-shaped type of composition.
Landscapes need energy to produce "stimulation," not repression,
and so the diagonal type is proportionately more numerous.

The rigid square is found only at an early stage in the
development of composition. Moreover, all the examples are
"story" pictures, for the most part scenes from the lives of
the saints, etc. Many of them are double-centre,--square, that
is, with a slight break in the middle, the grouping purely
logical, to bring out the relations of the characters. Thus,
in the "Dream of Saint Martin," Simone Martini, a fresco at
Assisi, the saint lies straight across the picture with his
head in one corner. Behind him on one side stand the Christ