Sir Kenneth Clark posits that the Classic nude is aesthetically and culturally beyond us. The completeness of rhetoric and technique are averse to our prediliction for the fragmentary and accidental. This came up again with Prof Lancaster and Hadyn. He points out that Baroque musical form is based upon the rhetorical devices of Quintillian. One states a premise,and another,then develops an argument and arrives at a conclusion. The “premise” is stated as a musical theme or idea.I assume, the same would have been applied to painting and all the other arts, particularly given the multi-arts sweep of Baroque. The wit, Professor Lancaster says, has an “aha “quality, not a “ha ha”. A large part of this would have been the conspicuous displays of erudition,linking subthemes and motifs,legends and narratives, as a commentary on the main theme or subject. Of more interest to me,is the notion that the pictorial language of pure composition must have been considered in the same way.Note that “rhetoric” here is more than “allegory” and “technique” means more than”finish”. Thats where it ended up in the worst of Salon Silliness.In Renoir’s Grand Baignuese we can see an impressionist realising that the dissolution of form itself had to be resisted in the nude, but is happily accommodated by the landscape.Renoirs painting is an argument as rhetorical as can be.