The window is not "Portuguese" because it represents Portugal—it is Portuguese because it embodies a way of making art that Ramalho identifies as the essence of national genius: the capacity to transgress all norms in the name of an inner truth that demands expression. What might appear to be the author's patriotic hyperbole reveals itself, upon closer reading, as a diagnosis of a stylistic and ideological singularity. The passage in which Ramalho describes the artist's creative attitude constitutes one of the most radical texts on artistic freedom written in Portugal in the nineteenth century. It is worth quoting it in full: "The artist, in full possession of his idea, in complete independence of his spirit, in entire freedom of his means of execution, unsays all vows, abjures all principles, renounces all canons, infringes all rules, and dispenses with all the applause of masters, suffocating in the entrails of his own vanity the opinion he holds of himself, solely because he has faith in the truth he enunciates, because he has concentrated all the force of his soul, all the energy of his brain, all the passion of his blood, in the love of the work in which he represents the thought that dominates him." The accumulation of verbs here is devastating: unsays, abjures, renounces, infringes, dispenses, suffocates. We are not witnessing simple stylistic disobedience, but total insurgency. The Manueline artist, in Ramalho's reading, does not innovate out of ignorance or technical incapacity—on the contrary, he fully masters the codes he decides to violate. The transgression is conscious, deliberate, "premeditated and defiant," in the words that Ramalho would use in another context when speaking of the "heretical" character of Manueline architecture. And what makes this transgression legitimate, even sacred, is absolute fidelity to an "inner truth" that the artist "has faith" in enunciating. Artistic freedom is not arbitrary license; it is obedience to a law superior to that of schools and treatises: the law of expressive sincerity. This conception brings Ramalho, curiously, close to a late romanticism that saw in individual genius the primary source of all authentic creation. But there is a crucial difference: Ramalho does not celebrate the abstract individualism of the isolated artist; he celebrates an individualism that is simultaneously collective. The window is "tremblingly Portuguese" precisely because the artist, by obeying only his inner vision, ends up giving voice to deep national energies that no academic precept could codify. It is this paradox—individual freedom as a path of access to the collective unconscious—that confers coherence on Ramalho's aesthetic theory.