De Waal speaks of the light in the spaces between figures in gilded altar paintings.
In between, figures and timbres came and went in a tumbling mix held tight by the pulsing.
The idea seems to have been that conflict between figures of disparate capabilities and temperaments would re-energise the genre.
One, "Meeting of the Minds," offered imagined conversations between figures of the past, among them Emily Dickinson, Galileo, Charles Darwin and Attila the Hun.
Their world is one of photo ops, the great non-event that is PMQs, and absurd debates between figures that the public no longer cares about.
Over the past decade, several books have retraced the links between figures such as Brand and Wallace, sixties counterculture, and the early days of the Internet.
But Feldman came up with his own brilliant solution: repeated figures in different instruments floating at different rates and recurring irregularly so that the relationship between figures keeps changing.
Jon Lansman, the co-founder of Momentum, has warned against any challenge to Tom Watson as deputy leader and called for an end to personal animosity between figures from Labour and the unions.
In his paintings, Brewster always struggled with the illusion of a realistic relationship between figures and background, and the half-length portraits allowed him to avoid this problem and focus on the sitter's face.
Other advocates said that the discussion, on national television and between figures as prominent as former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, was a victory in itself.
