'Parallelism' can be pointed out in the different parts of a single object, looked at alone; it is even more obvious when one puts several objects of… - Ferdinand Hodler

This beautiful head [of Valentine Godé-Darel], this whole body, like a Byzantine empress on the mosaics of Ravenna - and this nose, this mouth - and the eyes, they too, those wonderful eyes - all these the worms will eat. And nothing will remain, absolutely nothing!

If a few people who have come together for the same purpose sit around a table, we can understand them as parallels making up a unity, like the petals of a flower. When we are happy we do not like to hear a discordant voice that disturbs our joy. Proverbially, it is said: Birds of a feather flock together. In all these examples parallelism, or the principle of repetition, can be pointed out. And this parallelism of experience is, in expression, translated into the formal parallelism which we have already discussed.

If an object is pleasant, repetition will increase its charm; if it expresses sorrow or pain, then repetition will intensify its melancholy. On the contrary, any subject that is peculiar or unpleasant will be made unbearable by repetition. So repetition always acts to increase intensity. Since the time that this principle of harmony was employed by the primitives, it has been visually lost, and so forgotten. One strove for the charm of variety, and so achieved the destruction of unity.. .Variety is just as much an element of beauty as parallelism, provided that one does not exaggerate it. For the structure of our eye itself demands that we introduce some variety into any absolutely unified object.. .To be simple is not always as easy as it seems.. .The work of art will bring to light a new order inherent in things, and this will be: the idea of unity.