When one now adds to these influences, the steady rise of the power of the bourgeoisie in Europe, from the seventeenth century onward, and, as a result of this increasing power, an uninterrupted growth in the art of portrait painting--a growth that attained such vast proportions that it cast all attainments of a like nature in any other age or continent into the shade--one can easily understand what factors have been the most formidable opponents of Ruler-Art in the Occident, since the event of the Renaissance. After all that I have said concerning the principles of Ruler-Art, it will scarcely be necessary for me to expatiate upon those elements in portrait painting which are antagonistic to these principles; for when you think of portrait painting as it has been developed by the claims of the bourgeoisie in Europe, you must not have Leonardo da Vinci's "Mona Lisa" in mind. Neither must you consider that portrait work in which, by chance, the artist has had before him a model who, in every feature of face or of figure, corresponded to his ideal; nor that in which the artist has been able to allow himself to exercise his simplifying and transfiguring power. Otherwise some of the best of Rubens' and Rembrandt's work would of necessity come under the ban which we must set upon by far the greater number of portraits. [Illustration: Saskia By Rembrandt.] When Rembrandt painted his bride Saskia,[28] for instance, the extent to which he exercised his simplifying and transfiguring power is amazing, and precludes all possibility of our classing this work among the portraits which should be condemned. He knew perfectly well that poor Saskia was not beautiful--what beautiful girl would have condescended to look at Rembrandt?--so what did he do? He cast all the upper and right side of her face in shadow, and deliberately concentrated all his attention, and consequently the attention of the beholder as well, upon three or four square inches of nice round muscle in the lower part of Saskia's young cheek and neck. But how many plain daughters of rich bourgeois would allow three or four square inches of their cheek and neck to be exalted in this way, at the cost of their eyes and their nose and their brow? The same remarks also apply to Rembrandt's "Jewish Rabbi" in the National Gallery. There he had to deal with an emaciated, careworn old Jew. How did he overcome the difficulty? All of you who know this picture will be able to answer this question for yourselves, and I need not, therefore, go into the matter.