Though a distinctive genre, scholarly treatment of seventeenth-century Dutch group portraits has been infrequent following Alois Riegl’s 1902 Das Holländische Gruppenporträt. Twentieth-century engagement with group portraits has largely focused either on the example of Rembrandt, as in the contributions by Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann (Rembrandt: The Nightwatch, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982) and Margaret Carroll (“Rembrandt’s Nightwatch and the Iconological Traditions of Military Company Portraiture in Amsterdam,” PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1976), or else considered the paintings as straightforward historical documents of the groups represented, as in the catalogue to the 1988 exhibition Schutters in Holland at the Frans Hals Museum. Harry Berger’s Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief offers an alternative interpretative model by considering their highly constructed nature, the role of posing in production and reception, and the often particularly masculine interpersonal relations registered by the group portraits, though he too centers his study on Rembrandt’s paintings. Manhood, Marriage, and Mischief closely follows literary historian Berger’s initial foray into the visual arts, Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt Against the Italian Renaissance (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2000). Indeed, the first section of the book, nearly half of its total length, stands as a description, defense, and extension of the methodology Berger introduced...