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1. Pay attention to the author’s method for teasing out theoretical concepts about self-fashioning from Holbein’s painting, as well as to the fact that the primary topic of his book is English literature (note the book’s subtitle: ‘From More to Shakespeare’).
2. How would you characterise the discussion of identity and subjectivity here? What are the conflicts in the painting according to Greenblatt, and how do they operate?

(1) Greenblatt does not, as such describe ‘self-fashioning’ as a theoretical concept or define it. It is rather implicit, at least in this piece. This is characteristic of certain kinds of literary theory, which aim to persuade that the theory used is born of empirically observable facts..

Look, for instance, at p. 20 para. 2:

The next sentence uses reference to ‘the power of human shaping’ to characterise and summarise what is described here. Yet where is this notion really defined or spelled out in a way that can be challenged. In this extract it is not. Hence, the passage can elide certain agencies. Is the ‘pose’ crafted by the two diplomats or by Holbein to allow us to see through the imposture? That question will not be answered. This is because Greenblatt is working from a consideration of the humanist diplomat More to seeing Shakespeare as that artist who writes ‘character’ in ways that allow us to see the character fashioning an ideal image of itself, whilst allowing us to see behind that mask. This is, after all, the aim of most theatrical drama whether that of Shakespeare’s Othello or Leontes or any of Ibsen’s characters, including the Emperor Julian in Julian the Apostate.

It is totally appropriate to call this a ‘teasing out’ of concept rather than a theoretical discussion or even the application of theory, which might require some robust inter-disciplinary thinking. 

I totally agree with Greenblatt’s statement however that this picture offers us signs for interpretation, which interpretations (even of the question ‘what is reality in this picture?’) it then undermines. (p. 20 para 3). The problem is that like most literary critics, Greenblatt uses the tools of his trade as if there were no difference necessitated by the cultural object examined. Having noticed the uneasy and disturbing ‘reflection’ upon each other of the anamorphic skull and the skull brooch that is worn by one diplomat, he offers this ‘close reading’ as the key to his interpretation that the picture both celebrates the human capacity to map the world and undermines its efficacy in a world that other than the means we use to represent it.  His characterisation of visual art (presumably compared to literature) is of the former’s ‘sensuous immediacy and simultaneity’.

This strikes me as a cliché. In an obvious sense the process of reading literature and auditing/seeing dramas necessitates temporal as well as spatial issues, but it is naïve to  think that visual art is processed outside of time or in immediacy. Otherwise we can only attribute Greenblatt’s ability to see the well obscured brooch skull as an effect of critical and special close reading. In fact I think this is not the case. The picture, like most products of the norther, rather than Italian, Renaissance operates very differently to the stress on ordered perspective in say, Raphael. Yes, Greenblatt has noticed the brooch. Here it is.

 This piece of painterly virtuosity can be noticed only with the ability of the viewer to spend time as well as critical intelligence on the picture and it is this call to temporal attention that characterise the virtuosity of the Northern renaissance I believe. And, in doing so, other images emerge. The same diplomat wears a pendant (no doubt also a sign of wealthy imposture) in which Satan (by Archangel Michael?) is overcome and the crucified Christ hovers in the extreme upper right hand of the picture (hiding, like Polonius, behind an arras) – only seeable if you give time to the painting. If you see all this, it may undermine the imposture of diplomacy, science and education but it does not do so by leaving everyone merely with post-modern angst about the lack of unitary meaning, although for me as a non-Christian it must do so.

Hence my feeling about Greenblatt is that sacrifices accuracy about the process of seeing visual art (and accuracy about the different roots of the Northern Renaissance) for an attempt to wear the cloak of the theory to cover meretricious subjectivism. Is that too harsh?

(2) Greenblatt seems to argue that while identity is observable and readable from signs of complex and shifting meaning, it can be distinguished from our apprehension of how the characters presented through these signs appear subjectively to themselves. Moreover, identity and subjective self-apprehension can clash – they can mean different and sometimes contradictory things. We are used to dealing with Shakespeare, of course, in this fashion, wherein we see action and character in conflict – as too in Browning’s Italian painter monologues. We can see our diplomat as proud in the vanity of his education, place in court and the world but open to being undermined by the otherness of mortality and even perhaps notions of sacrifice and redemption which go beyond the ornamental. These conrtradictions make up our and probably Holbein’s ‘reality’. However, Holbein, in effect can afford not to rest on the fissures between contradictory readings. If, as viewers, we can’t, it is because the meaning of all symbols, icons and signs change diachronically in time. Greenblatt’s reading effectively hides this basic truth from us – merely because he insists response to visual art is about simultaneity. I do not believe it is.

Well, that's what I thought on 22/9/17.

All the best

Steve