Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (review)

Harry Berger Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 487 pp.

Berger comes to art history from outside art history, like fresh air through an opened window. But his animated entrance is more like a wall being knocked out. His subject is Rembrandt and the act of portrayal—self-portrayal, as in the topos attributed to Cosimo di' Medici: "Every painter paints himself" (ogni dipintore digigne sè). Does he really? How can a painter paint himself if his self-image is formed in the eyes of others? His self-image in a mirror is an image of the moment; his imagined self-image, a fiction of what he thinks he looks like, which amounts to a doubled-up, or tautological, fiction: to picture oneself is to picture a picture of oneself. To paint himself, an artist must imagine himself as someone else, or he wouldn't have a sitter. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes said of this conundrum, speaking for the artist, "I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object. . . . I am truly becoming a spectator." There is a lot more, of course, to Berger's book. I've given you only the pit of the peach.