[311] symbols in the different arts. I start again with the visual arts.^a I gave you already one symbol, namely landscapes. Another are faces, the art of the portrait---if it is art and not photography. If it is photography, it falls under other laws, which become more and more difficult, because the artistically inclined photographers try to bring as much artistic elements as possible into the photography. Nevertheless the essential difference is . . . [?] . But the portrait is a symbol. In which sense? If we look at a portrait, which is a work of art, then it might be very far removed from a photographic or mirror picture of the personality. Nevertheless it can be the symbol for a personal

life process which the artist gets out of the totality of the life of this person and the meaning of this life for the person himself and for others, and if it is (now I say) a "great" portrait, for the universe. When we look at a portrait of an old man or woman by Rembrandt^b, then you have not a photograph of this old man---the greatest of himself in his self-portraits---but you have something quite different: you have the spiritual biography of a human being expressed in his face; and again this not simply in terms of what this biography means for this individual person, but in terms as a representative of a microcosmic embodiment of the universe---in the good Renaissance^c tradition. In the Renaissance

the individual is the microcosm (which means, in English, the "small cosmos") which mirrors the macrocosm (the universe, the "large cosmos"). In this way these pictures become representative of the universe as such. Now here you have the face of a human being which has its photographic side and which can be photographed and which we encounter in everyday life, always a little bit different,