'Psyche by the Waters of the Styx'

This time Romney has approached the pendant episode in terms of formal contrast. The handling of space is both abrupt and ambiguous where in the previous cartoon it had an orthodox narrative function. Light effects are more extreme. The cartoon makes a much more direct, visceral impact. To use the categories of visual experience favoured by eighteenth-century theorists, it is an exercise in the "sublime" as against "the picturesque".