Introduction
"That portraits can be viewed as imitations or likenesses,not of
individuals only, but also of their acts of posing."
More than half the book is not about Rembrandt but about the
development of portraiture in early modern Europe." During this discussion the
emphasis on patronal self-representation and its importance is the core...and
its two most important implications are.. the shift of attention from the
painter's to the sitter's part in the act of(self)portrayal, the second is a
correlative shift in the conception of the primary object the portrait
imitates: its primary referent object or referent is not the likeness of a
person
but the likeness of an act,the act of posing."
"Chapter one considers a system of techno-material practices and
conventions,2 and 3 consider the structure and consequences of a system of
social
practices and conventions,4-9 consider the structure and consequences of a
system of practices and conventions that govern the poses in commissioned
portraits. In part three the scene shifts from Italian to Dutch portraiture
and part four is devoted to self portraits by Rembrandt."
He says that he owes much in his concept of theatricality to Michael
Fried. He quotes Brilliant as " the portrait presents a person to the
viewer" where" presents connotes display rather than presence,but that it would
be
better to say that the portrait presents, performs, stages not a person but
a representation, and the representation not of a person but of an act of
self-representation.
THere follow several pages on the importance of not confusing the act of
self representation with the repeated acts which society uses to classify
a human within the system of the society nor with self-presence, self
identity.
He uses Peirce's sign-referent relations: the icon,the sign that denotes by
resemblance(visual imitation),the symbol, the sign that denotes by
convention(language), and the index(smoke and fire), that points to a dynamic
relation between itself and its referent. The context of understanding and
the
fabric of cultural presupposition and the awareness of the categorical
distinctions among types of sign function are necessary for their
successful signification and at the same time account for the differing or
changing interpretations,collectively these three things are called the
interpretant. Here mimetic idealism and the apparatus of patronism are both
part of the interpretant. Icon is construed here as a visual sign, a portrait
as a sign that denotes by resemblance. Since the possible state the
portrait sign denotes and resembles is the prior act of portrayal, its relation
to
what it denotes and resembles is indexical as well as iconic. The assumption
here is that the portrait's claims to iconicity and indexicality are
fictitious. The practice of putting donors into religious paintings and how
ridiculous this was when there were great numbers of them in a painting is
touched on.
This book is on Google books if you don't have a copy.
KAte Sullivan
