Tate Britain has several demands on the display of its collection. Foremost is its role as the leading national museum exclusively devoted to showing works of what is called the British School of painting (and, to a lesser extent, of sculpture). It should be able to exhibit not only the work of major figures in considerable depth but also prime examples by many lesser artists who have contributed to the full current of British visual culture. The display must be amenable to visitors, especially those from abroad, for many of whom the British School is unfamiliar territory, with only a handful of recognisable names to guide them.

The exhibition Manet. Ritorno a Venezia at the Palazzo Ducale, Venice (to 18th August), sets out to illustrate the role that Italian Renaissance painting played in the art of Edouard Manet.1 Stéphane Guégan, the show’s curator, writing in the catalogue, proposes that an over-emphasis on Manet the hispanisant, enshrined in the Manet/Velázquez exhibition in Paris and New York in 2002–03, overplayed the formal aspects of Manet’s technique, obscured non-Spanish sources, and depreciated the value of Manet’s later, luminous Impressionist works. Nevertheless, the present exhibition checklist has been opened up from its Italian focus and gives Venice the considerable visual pleasure of a full-fledged Manet show.