Description
Book SynopsisThis lavishly illustrated reading of the structure and meaning of portraiture asks what happens when portraits are interpreted as imitations or likenesses not only of individuals but also of their acts of posing. Includes 84 illustrations, 40 in color.
Trade Review"Berger comes to art history from outside of art history, like fresh air through an open window." --
Common Knowledge"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 HistoryTable of ContentsIntroduction 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.
