ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the idea of the artwork ceaselessly concentrating and dispersing itself in forces and processes which can be equated with vision and experience is a significant element within George Frederic Watts's 'project' as early as the 1860s. For Watts, art and life, grasped in terms of the atmospheric presence of energy, made their identities known through a luminous vibration which weaves itself into sensation. Instead of the principles of harmony, unity and proportion associated with traditional academic history painting, the composition is marked by the conflict between volumetric modelling and flattened forms. Watts, whose writing on the identification of the figure as the organizing principle of the composition is derived from his understanding of classical aesthetics, as modified by Michelangelo and Reynolds, produces little sense of unity in this painting.
