1. Like The Syndics, this essay is a product of interaction with those who made it possible,
2. first of all, the editorial board and copyeditors at Representations. The distant origin of
3. the essay was a conversation before The Syndics with Marek Wieczorek, who has since
4. been an unflagging interlocutor. Reaching further back, Svetlana Alpers first intro
5. duced me to art history as an undergraduate at Berkeley, and my disagreements with her are an expression of my utmost respect. I am further grateful to Susan Sterling, Minnie Sterling, Benjamin Lapp, Joseph Koerner, David Freedberg, Richard Brilliant, David Rosand, Holly Haynes, and Lynn Binstock for their ongoing support. John Landewe and Jose Krapp posed as sample-masters with Beneschs first edition, and Stephen Tunney posed as Rembrandt and Joonsung Yoon took the photographs for my reconstructions. Thanks are due to the print room of the Boymans Museum for their assistance, Michel van der Laar for discussing the restoration of The Syndics, Sebastian Dudock van Heel for his help in the Amsterdam archives, and Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann and David Stone for the Doomer and Guercino references. I am pleased to acknowledge a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities while I was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, where I completed the final revisions of this essay.