Painting has a density which is obscured if we isolate the recognition of the subject from the sense of the medium. If we look at the orgy scene of Hogarth's Rake's Progress, the disheveled shirt of the Rake flows with the liquidity of paint: only painted shirts can flow like that, and the dancer on the right has an exuberance which is simultaneously that of the painting and of the figure. And only in a painting could the figures be related as they are.

One way of generalizing this is to say that we see the subject matter – the things that lie in the world outside the painting and upon which the painting draws – as dissolved, reconstituted, and recombined. It seems natural to say that we see the subject formulated in the medium. But to talk of formulation is at least to invite an analogy with language which could be taken in rather different ways: for example, we might try to make the analogy with literature or with language in general. In this situation three questions seem naturally to present themselves: (1) how do we understand the relation of subject to medium? (2) of representation to the order or design in painting? and (3) if we pursue the analogy between painting and literature, what stands to representational painting as language in general stands to the literature in that language?