Fictions of the Pose: Facing the Gaze of Early Modern Portraiture

Gender and National Identity in David Allan's Small, Domestic and Conversation Paintings

“…the voyeuristic fiction of candour'. 46 The sitters seem to be engaged in some activity or other so as to appear as if not posing. The advantages are obvious: if a sitter is obviously posed then we may conclude that they and the painter have worked to display them favourably, arranging their facial expressions and comportment.…”

Cézanne paints: ‘whole body’ practices and the genre of self‐portrayal

“…In discussing the portrait of Vollard Schapiro says, 'It is not a revealing study of the face but an image of the man of books, the writer among his things '(1969, 94). Bette Talvacchia called to my attention an interesting article by Harry Berger Jr (1994) 'Fictions of the pose: Facing the gaze of early modern portraiture'. While I am not in total agreement concerning his interpretations of some Mannerist portraits, his emphasis on the staged relation between sitter and painter in portrayal compliments my own and his article is replete with insights about the gaze in the portrait from the sitter to the viewer.…”

Temporality and the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Portrait

“…While, to use Harry Berger's term, this subject "poses" for us, his gesture asks the viewer to contemplate man's life as but a small segment of the larger unbroken Aristotelian-Christian time of eternity. 18 Life is linked to the cosmological order which can be contemplated in time but whose duration is not itself broken into discrete moments.…”