"Rembrandt surpasses Lievens in the faculty of penetrating to the heart of his subject matter and bringing out its essence, and his works come across more vividly. Lievens, in turn, surpasses him in the proud self-assurance that radiates from his compositions and their powerful forms. Because Lievens's spirit - and this is due in part to his youth - is charged with the great and the glorious, he is inclined to depict the objects and models before him not life-sized but larger than life. Rembrandt on the other hand, obsessed by the effort to translate into paint what he sees in the mind's eye, prefers smaller formats, in which he nonetheless achieves effects that you will not find in the largest works of others."