Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance. - book review

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 really only performances of what it means to he a sitter). The book is unconventional in its organization. It devotes the first three hundred and fifty of its six hundred pages to the theory and "system of early modern painting," arriving at Rembrandt only in the last quarter of the book. Along the way, Berger addresses the history and "politics" of the commissioned portrait in Renaissance Italy, the cultural history of Dutch portrait painting prior to Rembrandt, and the larger intersections of post-modern cultural theory with early modern portraiture practices. Rembrandt is never absent from any of the above, but neither is he the hero of the tale--until, that is, we come at last to understand the full force of the term against in the book's subtitle. When the "figure" of Rembrandt emerges from the "ground" of Renaissance culture in the book's concluding chapters, it does so less in the demure fashion of Botticelli's Venus, arising decorously above a dimpled sea, and more in the mode of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, laughing cannily at the conventions that preceded and enabled him.

Scholars of Dutch art will recognize in Berger's title an allusion to Kenneth Clark's earlier book Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance. (2) Clark provides Berger with a model for a dialectical art history grounded in the contrasts between northern and southern painting. The model, of course, is not unique to Clark. Berger points out a complicated genealogy that links Clark to a series of prior interpreters: Heinrich Wolfflin, Alois Riegl, and behind them--far behind them--Tacitus, each of whom treated culture in the language of binary opposition, and all of whom, at one point or other, located that opposition along a north-south axis. What interests Berger is the way that Clark, in particular, argues for the "manner in which Rembrandt transformed his style by the study of Italian renaissance art" (p. 430). Clark posits a complex dialogue between Rembrandt and Italy that gave voice to both "anti-classical" and "classicizing" tendencies in Rembrandt's art. In Clark's account, Rembrandt turned to Raphael and q uattrocento composition for the "clarity and economy" lacking in Baroque styles, even as he dallied, to more painterly ends, in the "imaginative world of Titian and Giorgione" and the "great Venetians" (p. 431).

Berger, however, is less interested in the specifics of Clark's account than he is in its logic: the way that Clark reaches toward but ultimately fails to achieve a theory of "allusion." Clark writes about "influence" rather than allusion. He treats the ways that Rembrandt was both cognizant of and influenced by Florentine and Venetian art. But, as Berger notes, influence is a one-way street. It travels from Renaissance Italy to Rembrandt, and it does so either as a result of conscious study or unconscious assimilation. When the direction is reversed--when the question is not who influenced Rembrandt but how Rembrandt interpreted and revised his Italian sources--then we have shifted the discourse in the opposite direction, reading Italy through Rembrandt's eyes.

More is at stake here than intellectual traffic patterns. To write a study of influence is, generally speaking, to work "genetically," to ask how Italian art shaped Rembrandt's aesthetic world. And though this approach may once have been the method of choice among scholars, one that Berger notes has "long dominated art history" (p. 429), it fails to ask the more interesting and perhaps pragmatic question of use-value: How does the painter deploy past forms for his own ends? What seems at first no more than a slight shift in scholarly emphasis proves in the end to have enormous consequences. For example: it disallows a more generalized and vaguely humanistic discourse (Rembrandt absorbed the lessons of Venetian art) and replaces it with a more agon-driven and visually mediated analysis (Rembrandt appropriates Venetian protests against Florentine classicism as a "preemptive model" for his own anticlassical biases). For example: it requires us to read visual images as we would literary texts, finding the essenti al work of the painting not in the cultural belief system of the painter but in the rhetorical moves internal to the image itself (the two are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they the same). For example: it allows us to capture with precision the complex process by which painters not only internalize prior art but also "imitate, emulate, appropriate, and sublate" (p. 459) their precursors by both transcending and incorporating their "dangerous" but "seductive" appeal.

If the above sounds very Bloomian, then we are on the right track. Berger's notion of "revisionary allusion" owes much to Harold Bloom, with this exception. Bloom has positioned himself in recent years as one of the Last Great Defenders of the Canon and the Cult of Genius that attends it. Berger, to the contrary, while borrowing from Bloom, sets himself against any lingering whiff of "essentialism." In fact--and this gets us straight to the book's core--Fictions of the Pose works by refusing the reader any access to an "authentic" self. The markers of humanism have disappeared here. Berger rejects any belief in an inner core, an abiding self, on the other side of the painted portrait. What we see when we look at a Rembrandt portrait, or any other early modern figure study for that matter, is not a representation of the soul, a glimpse into the subject's inner world, but the mise en abime of representation itself. We see only the pose of the sitter, who in collusion with the painter constructs an image of hims elf that is really a record of his posing as not-posing. Or, as Berger slyly phrases the matter: the sitter "knows that we know that he knows that we are gazing at him" (p. 387). Only this and nothing more.

Which leads me to a certain theory about Rembrandt that helps explain his abiding fascination for scholars (all those books) and Berger's fascination with him. In a world without God, Rembrandt is the Next Best Thing.

I offer this not as a theological proposition but as a cultural observation. That chiseling sound you hear in the world next door is the slow whittling away of the last vestiges of the logocentric tradition. What has happened to God over the past two centuries is now taking place with Rembrandt. He was once, art historically speaking, the Great White Hope, an embodiment of Genius, the master Protestant painter who intuited and made visible, as no one had before him, the dignity of individual souls, however ungainly their bodies. For those of a more secular bent, but still committed to the verities of humanism, he was the prophet of early modern individualism, pursuing through his endless self-portraits the odyssey of the inner life, a diarist in pigments.

But now he has become the Cindy Sherman of early modern painting, a poseur and role-player whose identity extends no further than the many painterly performances he teasingly presides over, Svetlana Alpers prepared us for this reading. Her compelling account of Rembrandt's studio practices as a kind of theater set the stage, so to speak, for Berger's more radical, and perhaps also more literary, reading of early modern portraiture itself as endless theater: all pose, hence all fiction, with no hint or promise of an "authentic" self to anchor the show. Berger's Rembrandt deploys the technologies of early modern painting not to get at the truth of the soul, or at any truth for that matter, but to show us what happens to portraiture when we take seriously, and radically, the notion of the self as a social construction.

Consider, for example, C. S. Peirce, whose magisterial taxonomy of the signifying system (icon, index, and symbol) Berger tweaks in a decidedly postmodern direction (pp. 20-27). Peirce defined icons and indices by the degree of their approximation to their referents. Icons resemble the objects they suggest, while indices actually participate in--bear some dynamic relation to--their referent. Only the symbol, for Peirce, functions in arbitrary fashion, its ability to signify grounded entirely in social "convention." Berger updates Peirce by extending his understanding of the symbol to virtually the whole of the signifying field. All recognition, for Berger, requires the consent of an audience: we must agree in advance to the conventions that denote resemblance. In this light, even icons and indices work symbolically. Their ability to signify requires first a set of social conventions to which the viewer assents. We act as if certain arbitrary juxtapositions are in fact "resemblances." Hence, Berger continues, a portrait is neither an icon nor an index but a "fiction" that "denotes by convention that it denotes by resemblance" (p. 24). Farewell to all ideologies of the eye (or the portrait) as a window to the soul. What replaces them is the "fiction of the pose," the assumption that governs Berger's writing that "the portrait is lying--is encouraging the referential fallacy--and that its claims to iconicity and indexicality are fictitious" (p. 27). What we see when we look at a Rembrandt portrait is a revised (fictionalized) version of a compact between painter and sitter to represent the moment of the sitting in certain terms, often those that efface the concocted nature of the pose.

Another way to put this would be to say that Berger's book is about "naturalization," the long, steady march of early modern history toward forms of representation that deny or repress their own constructed nature. Berger has a term for this process: sprezzatura. Drawing on Baldassare Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, Berger defines sprezzatura as "the ability to show that one is not showing all the effort one obviously put into learning how to show that one is not showing effort" (p. 97). The playfulness of Berger's prose here mimics the conundrum of Castiglione's courtier, who must present himself to the outside world in a fashion that carefully cultivates his claim to power as natural, inborn, and uncultivated. Berger reads the history of portraiture, and, implicitly, of easel painting itself, as a narrative of new "technologies" designed to address a crisis among the Italian aristocracy of the 15th and 16th centuries.

In the face of redistributions of power exploited or endured by self-made princely regimes and mercantile oligarchies, the ascriptive norms developed under feudal conditions remain necessary but are no longer sufficient. They have to be supplemented by skills of self-representation that respond to new legal, political, and ideological pressures on aristocratic status. (p. 95)

Portrait painting, in other words, takes a performative turn when its history is staked to the fortunes of competing elites in early Renaissance Italy. The cultural work of the portrait is to present to the viewer a version of the sitter that legitimates the sitter's moral authority and political efficacy in an era when hereditary entitlements will no longer suffice. And sprezzatura, in turn, represents less a style or attitude than a way of being in the world: a mode of self-representation that advances the courtier's interests by both revealing and concealing the studied nonchalance that, at a certain historical moment, holds the key to power. If Roland Barthes is correct that naturalization is the great, unspoken secret of bourgeois aesthetics, then sprezzatura must be understood as its ancestral--and aristocratic--point of origin.

And now for something completely different: Holland. When Berger turns his attention from Renaissance Italy to the history of the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, he tracks a different sort of class conflict. In a brief but brilliant account, Berger notes the tensions between regents and the House of Orange that ramified up and down the social spectrum. Building on Simon Schama's trope of the Dutch "embarrassment of riches, and Marjolein 't Hart's narrative of the Dutch Republic as a decentralized society defined by local and competing interests, Berger pinpoints those sites of instability in the social and political system that encouraged--as an antidote to their own vulnerabilities--new forms of representation. The painter provided the patron with a remarkable cultural crutch: new ways of being seen in the world, new forms of self-presentation, that served for both patron and painter as potent weapons in the battle for legitimation.

Of course, what you see is not always what you get. Berger is quick to point out that Dutch portraiture, however much it desired to flatter the sitter, quickly bumped into limits that were less painterly than structural. Berger finds everywhere in Dutch art a condition that he terms "orthopsychic anxiety." The phrase has a Lacanian ring about it and is meant to suggest the underside of the Dutch patron's desire to appear in a socially correct and often aristocratically inflected mode. According to Jacques Lacan, the infant encounters in his mirror image an instance of bodily wholeness and integrity lacking in everyday life. This "orthopsychic" unity establishes a normative but imaginary version of the self that will forever haunt the individual, who must live his life in the interstices of his mirrored being. What Dutch portraiture reveals, especially in its unexpected details of texture and gesture, are the "traces of embarrassment" that attend the sitter's attempt to present a version of himself or herself caught in a moment not only of Lacanian self-division but ideological "bad faith." For a burgher society bent on republican ideals, the strategy of "noble emulation may be an enterprise risky enough to produce--or at least betray the signs of--performance anxiety" (p. 278).

And who better to record those signs of anxiety than Rembrandt, whose entire career Berger reads as an elegant, comic, ambitious, self-conscious, and farce-ridden riff not simply on the theatrical conventions of the pose but also on theatricality itself. There is something Rabelaisian about Berger's Rembrandt, not so much in his zest for life as in his passion for "painterly self-critique." Berger waxes free with a series of slang terms for Rembrandt's portrait poses: the Bad Boy, the Macho Thug, the Slasher, the Patriarch, the Courtier, and, finally, when referring to one of Rembrandt's last self-portraits (the Cologne canvas titled variantly The Laughing Self-Portrait or Self-Portrait as Democritus), the Joker. This final painting discussed by Berger is "in some respects a portfolio of past performances." Only this time the sitter, or at least his "specular image," is "surprised by paint." "It's as if the normative act of mirror gazing indexed by self-portraiture has been obscured, so that the sitter's refl ection gives way to the interpretation of the painter, who already envisages the mirror embossed with carbuncles of pigment" (p. 511). The Joker represents Rembrandt's last hurrah, his Zarathustrian laugh at the very enterprise of portraiture, and his embrace, midst the crashing down of past conventions and present re-presentations, of the way that painting must "mutilate" itself in order to be itself. That mutilation is what Berger means by a "fiction": a pose held long enough to pass for life. It is "true" because it must be, and because, for post-moderns such as ourselves, it is all we know of life.

Rembrandt, then, is an odd kind of hero. His oddity lies in his being almost too human for what Berger requires of him. What Berger wants is neither a Great Man nor a Modern Hero but a cultural vector: a moment in the social formation that allows us to chart the power of discourse and representation in the shaping of modern sensibilities. Berger is quite explicit about this. In his critique of Norbert Elias's history of manners, (3) for example, Berger notes the way that Elias confused conflict at a cultural level with conflict at a more private level: the "actual psychic conflict within individual subjects" (p. 140). Elias sought to explain the increasingly self-reflective nature of social behavior in the postmedieval world as a result of changes in culture itself, most notably the rise of print technologies and the dissemination of a proliferating variety of conduct books. But Elias's focus on individual self-awareness in the act of improvement--a focus that reproduces that of the conduct books he studied-- usurped his larger concern with representation and its history. Hence, change for Elias tends to operate most powerfully at the level of individual consciousness rather than as an "effect of the discursive formation."

Berger, though admiring Elias's narrative, will have none of his humanistic psychology. "My aim," he notes, "is to recuperate the emphasis that, for me, gives his [Elias's] argument its power--the emphasis on discourses and representations as causes of inner conflict and as the sites of our interpretive access to it." For Berger, the "hidden self" or "inner self" is not a psychological truth but an "effect of representation." That thing we call the "soul," that "ghost in the machine" we ask our painters to reveal, is not a "prediscursive entity." Rather, the interior self is "but an effect of discourse and a product of new technologies of representation" (p. 141).

This faith (a term I use with deliberation) in the "discursive formation" as the true site of history, as where the action is, does funny things to Berger's Rembrandt. It requires him not only to embody the possibilities and contradictions inherent in that formation but also--and here is the catch--to oppose them. And that is an odd thing for a postmodern, poststructuralist hero to do. Again, Berger is quite clear about what his Rembrandt is up to: Rembrandt's paintings "perform a critique, a sometimes bumptious and hilarious parody" (p. 11), of what we might call today the painterly Establishment but what Berger refers to, more precisely, as the "scopic regime of mimetic idealism" (p. 77). By this latter phrase he means that system of flattery and idealization, embodied in the pose, that characterizes portrait painting as a representational technology and a class strategy in the early modern period. Under a rubric of truth to nature and homage to the ideal type, painters connived with their patrons to produc e on canvas what God or the feudal lord had failed to achieve in real life.

"Mimetic idealism," then, is really one of the great red herrings of art history. It naturalizes the pose by erasing its contrived character. It replaces class-mediated gestures with universalistic rhetorics: the "eye as a window to the soul," the "inner self" as hidden and private. These truisms surround the act of portraiture with an ideology of exposure, as if the goal of the painter were to reveal on canvas what the sitter, by himself or herself, could or would not admit. The result is not only--and perhaps curiously--to shift the attention away from the sitter to the painter, whose techniques now hold the key to character and its perception, and whose style now stands as a sign of insight and truth, but also to beget a form of art history that inadvertently buys into portraiture's own game. The art historian, like the painter, engages in a characterological game of hide-and-seek (are those hints of kindness or arrogance or cruelty that we see there, in the sitter's stare?). In the process, the critic for gets or-worse--buries the constructed and historically contingent nature of the pose. To draw attention, then, to the fictiveness of the pose is really a way of recovering history. Berger's goal is not to dabble in theory for its own sake but to demythologize history, to dig archaeologically beneath the rhetorics of character and inner life in order to find the historical pressures that produced them as rhetorics. Berger's ambition, then, is not to remythologize Rembrandt but to reinterpret him as a master of historical conventions.

But, to put the matter baldly, Rembrandt's oppositional stance, his willful desire to deconstruct the "scopic regime" that surrounds and defines him, invokes a type of countercultural narrative that progressive scholarship has been producing for a long time now. Berger's Rembrandt, almost against his (Berger's) will, resembles nothing so much as the hero (or antihero) that critics from the 1960s forward have most liked to admire. He is the Hero as Demythologizer, if not a truth teller, then a convention smasher. And--truth be told--it is this very tension in Berger's book that I most admire. Like most critics of the past twenty years, Berger is sensitive to the sins of the centered self. He reaches with extraordinary success toward a form of historical analysis defined by structures, regimes, discourses. He understands the power of representation not as a "reflection" of culture, a fortunate but adventitious overlay to the realms of political economy, but as the central player in the shaping of the modern wor ld. That is what it means to define the interior life as an "effect of representation," a marker of bourgeois class identity, rather than as an essential and ahistorical fact.

Despite his attentiveness to the Intentional Fallacy, Berger most wonderfully and richly falls victim to it. He winds tip creating a Rembrandt who, even if only an "effect," and even if only in his works, charms and delights us with his wisdom, his agency, and, of course, his folly. Berger reproduces, in other words, the sin that most distresses him about Norbert Elias. In the name of discourse and representation, he produces an individual of eccentric and outsize proportions. Perhaps this is because, deep down, Berger is himself a diehard, post-l960s cultural critic. Or perhaps this is because any study of culture, when mediated through the language of art history and the career of an individual artist, will necessarily drag along with it the discourses of self and identity. What it suggests to me, at least, is that Fictions of the Pose is really a wonderful salvo from within the Culture Wars. Berger has taken his stand with the discourse folk, the people who brought us the death of the author and the birth of the asylum. He reads early modern painters through the lens of postmodern theory, and he does so not because he assents to "presentism" or believes all history to be a narcissistic and self-referencing enterprise, but because he takes seriously the "modernity" of early modern studies. For Berger, the Renaissance and post-Renaissance worlds are interesting less for their alterity, their difference from us today, than for the remarkable genealogy they provide us, the way they beget the world we incorrectly believe ourselves to have invented on our own. And yet--despite his refusal to traffic in the remnants of humanism, his unhappiness with unseemly dollops of individual "agency" and "will"--Berger has managed to reinvent if not the author proper, then the Painter, not only as an effect of representation but also as a manipulator of it. He has given us a series of incisive interpretations of individual paintings, an intellectual and cultural history of astonishing scope, a revisionary account of cultural the ory that seeks to ground it in early modern history, and, above all, a Rembrandt for the Postmodern Age. If the King, as Berger defines him, is dead, then long live the King.

Notes

(1.) Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and Mieke Bal, Reading "Rembrandt": Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

(2.) Kenneth Clark, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (New York: New York University Press, 1966).

(3.) Norbert Elias, the History of Manners, vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

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