Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance.

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Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance.

HARRY BERGER JR.

Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University

Press, 2000. 624 pp; 32 color ills.,

51 b/w. $85; $39.95 paper

The late, great Rembrandt, I am happy to report, still lives. A veritable industry has sprung up around him. Amazon.com lists 416 books with his name in the title, most of them published in the past twenty years. Some of these books carry us away from the painter to the cultural fallout that surrounds his name (Jean Genet's What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet is not, I presume, the sort of text that most art historians consider essential reading). But all testify to the enduring presence of what, following Svetlana Alpers and Mieke Bal, we might term the "Rembrandt effect." (1)

There is a new kid on the block, an addition to the Rembrandt repertoire worth attending to. Harry Berger Jr., Professor Emeritus of Literature and Art History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, has written an erudite, chatty, demanding, discerning, and deeply rewarding account of Rembrandt's portraits and self-portraits (the distinction between the two, for Berger, is a slippery one, for the self-portraits are reall...

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