The foundational question this book explores is: what happens when portraits are interpreted as imitations or likenesses not only of individuals but also of their acts of posing when the observer s attention is redirected so that the primary object the portrait imitates becomes the likeness not of a person but of an act, the act of sitting for one s portrait? This shift of attention involves another: from the painter s to the sitter s part in the act of (self-)portrayal. At the ground level, Fictions of the Pose develops a hypothesis about the structure and meaning of portraiture. That foundation supports a first story devoted to the practices and politics of early modern Italian and Dutch portraiture and a second story devoted to Rembrandt s self-portraits, especially those in which he poses in fancy dress as if he were a patron. The author approaches the Rembrandt/Renaissance relation not as an art historian but as an interpreter trained in literary studies, taunted by the challenge of extending the practice of close reading from verbal to visual media and fascinated by the way this practice can show how individual works talk back to their contexts. The context for Rembrandt, the object and target of his looking-glass theater, is the structure of patron/painter relations that developed during the Renaissance and influenced the very different conditions of patronage that emerged in the Dutch Republic around the turn of the seventeenth century.
Harry Berger, Jr., is Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author, most recently, of Making Trifles of Terrors: Redistributing Complicities in Shakespeare (Stanford, 1997).
Introduction; Part I. Early Modern Technologies and Politics of Representation and Their Consequences: 1. Technologies: the system of early modern painting; 2. Politics: the apparatus of commissioned portraiture; 3. Consequences: Sprezzatura and the Anxiety of self-representation; Part II. Facing the Gaze: 4. The face as index of the mind: art historians and the physiognomic fallacy; 5. Physiognomy, mimetic idealism, and social change; 6. Elias on physiognomic skepticism: Homo Clausus and the anxiety of representation; 7. Lacan on the narcissism of orthopsychic desire; 8. Fictions of the pose (1): the fiction of objectivity; 9. Fictions of the pose (2): representing orthopsychic desire; Part III. The Embarrassment of Poses: On Dutch Portraiture: 10. Local matters; 11. The posography of embarrassment: representational strategies in a decentralized class society; 13. Rembrandt's embarrassment: an anatomy of group portraiture; Part IV. Rembrandt's Looking-Glass Theater: 14. Methodological interlude II: on self-portraits; 15. Good boys and bad: orthopsychic comedy in the early self-portraits; 16. Marking time: revisionary allusion in specular fictions; 17. Rembrandt as Burgher: waiting for Maerten Soolmans; 18. Methodological interlude III: texture versus facture; 19. Specular fictions in two etchings; 20. Married with Peacock: Saskia in Rembrandt's looking-glass theater; 21. Methodological interlude IV: on revisionary allusion - Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance; 22. Rembrandt as courtier; 23. Rembrandt in chains: the Medici self-portrait; 24. Rembrandt in Venice: the patriarch; 25. (Ef)facing the hand; 26. The last laugh: or, something more.
"Specialists in the field should be interested in Berger's re-interpretation of particular portraits by Rembrandt and other artists... More general readers can benefit from these summaries..." - Canadian Journal of History "Berger comes to art history from outside of art history, like fresh air through an open window." - Common Knowledge
