Artists either intuitively or consciously will balance certain elements and principles to create their works of art through mitigation. This is usually achieved by using one element to mitigate or lessen the impact of another element. Here is a painting by Claude Monet that features mostly cooler colors. Note that Monet uses a little warm color to mitigate that otherwise cool analogous harmony. This painting by Emmanuel Leutze has a lot of diagonal lines but added the vertical line of Washington so that the diagonal ones do not 'overtake' the work.
Any element used in a proper way can mitigate any other element. In the texture lecture the discussion of mitigation focused on the impact of texture on a shape. Often this effect can lead to a work, such as this one by Pierre Auguste Renoir, becoming more abstract as the shapes are somewhat distorted through this mitigating texture. The soft implied realistic texture that is expected becomes one that is more rough. It is mitigated.