The foundational question this book explores is: What happens when portraits are interpreted as imitations or likenesses not only of individuals but also of their acts of posing when the observer s attention is redirected so that the primary object the portrait imitates becomes the likeness not of a person but of an act, the act of sitting for one s portrait? This shift of attention involves another: from the painter s to the sitter s part in the act of (self-)portrayal. At the ground level, Fictions of the Pose develops a hypothesis about the structure and meaning of portraiture. That foundation supports a first story devoted to the practices and politics of early modern Italian and Dutch portraiture and a second story devoted to Rembrandt s self-portraits, especially those in which he poses in fancy dress as if he were a patron. The author approaches the Rembrandt/Renaissance relation not as an art historian but as an interpreter trained in literary studies, taunted by the challenge of extending the practice of close reading from verbal to visual media and fascinated by the way this practice can show how individual works talk back to their contexts. The context for Rembrandt, the object and target of his looking-glass theater, is the structure of patron/painter relations that developed during the Renaissance and influenced the very different conditions of patronage that emerged in the Dutch Republic around the turn of the seventeenth century.