CHRISTOPHER BRAIDER

REMBRANDT AGONISTES

Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance.  By Harry Berger, Jr.

Harry Berger’s Fictions of the Pose is a delight to read, but a devil to write about. This is especially true in a review, where the writer is responsible not only for those parts of a book that are of immediate relevance to his or her own research, but for the author’s work as an intricate whole. Having given us a book that is well over six-hundred-pages long and contains some eighty illustrations, Berger has a lot to say; and though style and tone retain a charming lightness and lucidity throughout, the detailed complexity of Berger’s thought is demanding. Fictions of the Pose is a literally monumental accomplishment whose virtues merit a more thorough airing than I can hope to provide here. Long as it is, the following summary must then be read as shamefully abbreviated.

Berger’s central theme is “the Rembrandt look,” a phrase that denotes “both the characteristic appearance of works attributed to (or deattributed from) Rembrandt—the way they look to us—and also the way they ‘look’ at other paintings,” that is, “the way they represent their relations to other paintings by conspicuous allusion and revision” (10 and, for a fuller exposition, 351-52). The book thus aims at one level to account for the uniqueness of the family of images we call “Rembrandts,” a class that contains not only authenticated products of Rembrandt’s hand, but also the many studio copies, imitations, and outright forgeries made possible just by the idiosyncratic and yet for that very reason characteristic nature of the body of works they emulate. Berger follows in this an important argument Svetlana Alpers advances in Rembrandt’s Enterprise (1988). Rembrandt’s most signal achievement is to have invented the work of art as a marketable commodity whose value consists in exhibiting the readily identifiable and therefore eminently reproducible formal properties that single it out as a work made by (or, more precisely, made in) a distinctive authorial hand. Rembrandt, in short, invents the “Rembrandt.” However, as the painter’s contemporaries were quick to observe, what makes a “Rembrandt” is not merely its intrinsic artistic properties considered in isolation; it is above all its flamboyant rejection of the Italian models to which the “high” art of the time was expected to conform. Berger persuasively adds one further point: that in setting his face against the norms, motives, and conventions shaping Italian art, Rembrandt contrived to expose the contradictions and concealments that form their ideological core. Insofar, then, as his paintings not only incorporate and comment on, but also radically critique the artistic tradition to which they belong, to talk about Rembrandt means talking about much else—and in particular the Italian Renaissance, of which he is the presciently ironical heir.