Édouard Manet

1832-1883 • French • Painter • Impressionist/Post-Impressionist

"[Academicians] thought they were doing the right thing; they were mistaken; they didn't see that in installing licensed opticians they not only killed competition, but that these opticians, accustomed to using a certain formula, would put glasses of the same strength on the noses of their pupils. The result has been a succession of the near-sighted and the far-sighted, depending on the distance that their professors saw.' - Édouard Manet

With his relatively flattened surfaces and color, Manet avoided imitating nature, and his paintings were neither highly emotional nor forthrightly sociopolitical. For these rejections of both ROMANTICISM and REALISM, respectively, Manet was claimed by and grouped with IMPRESSIONISTS. While he shared many of their subjects, Manet did not, however, share the Impressionist preoccupation with a fleeting sense of light and sensation as did MONET, for example, nor did he reject historical precedent, although he used it with a great measure of parody. The composition of Manet's Le Dejezmer sur I'herbe (1863) looks back to a famous engraving by RAIMONDI that claimed to be based on a lost work by RAPHAEL, and the ambiguity of portraying disrobed women in the presence of overdressed men in an ARCADIAN setting looks to GIORGIONE'S Fete Champetre (c. 1510). Manet's Olympia (also 1863), while in a long line of reclining nudes, is most directly a reference to TITIAN's Venus of Urbino ( 1538 ), a painting that introduced the frankness of a nude woman looking out of the picture at the observer. But where Titian's model is shy and tentative, Manet's is bold and looks directly, almost confrontationally, at the viewer. Thus looking out at those who are looking at her, she defies the age-old objectification of undressed women (see also GAZE). And with her candid, unidealized appearance, she is a frankly "naked" woman defying a tradition of prettified, ACADEMIC "nudes." When Dejeuner and Olympia were exhibited, reaction went from outrage at their immorality-" Abuses rain upon me like hail," Manet wrote to his friend BAUDELAIRE-to lascivious approval. Guards were stationed by Olympia to protect it from vandals. To what extent was it Manet's intention to shock, to aggravate, and to attract attention? It is noted that he sent Olympia to the SALON of 186 5 along with Jesus Mocked by Soldiers ( 1865 ), a provocative gesture. With all the uncertainty regarding their intended meaning, there is one undeniable truth: Dejeuner and Olympia changed both images and discussions of nude women in art. In 1889, six years after Manet's death, Olympia, once called an offense to both art and morals, was accepted for the collection at the Luxembourg Palace, and in 1908 it went into the Louvre. maniera greca Maniera greca refers to images in the "Greek manner," but not CLASSICAL, or pre- or post-Athenian Greek. To understand the logic behind this term one has to remember that the town of Byzantium (now Istanbul, Turkey) was originally Greek. So looking back to Christianized Byzantium, maniera greca describes Italian painting of the 13th century that was strongly influenced by BYZANTINE style. One channel of that influence may have to do with the occupation of Orthodox Christian Constantinople, in r 204, by the armies of the Fourth Crusade. This conquest contributed to the downfall of the Byzantine Empire but, paradoxically, it also reinvigorated Byzantine style in Italy. Artists whose works are associated with the maniera greca include CIMABUE, BERLINGHIERI, and DUCCIO. Mannerism After r 5 20 to c. r 600. Overlapping with the Late ITALIAN RENAISSANCE, Mannerism is said to have evolved from the writhing, twisted figures of MICHELANGELO'S late years, his "manner." Where Renaissance artists strove to achieve a reasoned balance and harmony, the Mannerist style is characterized by instability and exaggeration, most explicit in unnaturally elongated bodies and dramatic gestures. Painters usually labeled Mannerist include PONTORMO, BRONZINO, FIORENTINO, PARMIGIANINO, El GRECO, and the NORTHERN RENAISSANCE artist GOSSAERT; sculptors include CELLINI and BOLOGNA. Their figures bear some resemblance to the HELLENISTIC phase of GREEK ART; in fact, around 1610 El Greco painted at least three interpretations of the 2nd-century BCE LAOCOON sculpture group, which had been rediscovered in I 506 (and also had a strong effect on Michelangelo). The expressive power, restlessness, and distortion of Mannerism cannot be disassociated from the spiritual upheavals of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Thus, while some scholars describe the lack of emotional expressiveness in Mannerist paintings as disinterest in the emotional or inner life, others see it as a manifestation of inner vision. Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare were writing during this period.