It is the purpose of the present paper to give a natural method of realizing bounded symmetric domains as matrix-spaces. Our method yields, as special cases, the well-known bounded models of irreducible bounded symmetric domains of classical type (I)-(IV), as were already described in the original paper of E. Cartan [1] (see §3; we follow in this paper the classification table in [14], not in [1]). A direct application of this method will be to determine the canonical bounded models of the irreducible bounded symmetric domains of exceptional type; it will be published in another paper (see [6], [7] for the summary of the results).