Manet

Venice

by PHILIP RYLANDS

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.

To carry out its main objective, the exhibition juxtaposes Manet’s paintings with Venetian old masters. The principal glory of the show is the loan from the Musée d’Orsay of Olympia (cat. no.20), which has never pre­viously left Paris, exhibited next to Titian’s Venus of Urbino(no.21) from the Galleria degli Uffizi, in what is the first ever pairing of these two nudi di donna. This is a coup for which Gabriella Belli and the Fondazione Musei Civici of Venice are to be congratulated. A second coup, omitted in the press com­munications surrounding the show, is that Olympia has been reunited with her no less vilified companion at her Salon debut, Christ mocked by soldiers (no.30), a contrapposto if ever there were one: sacred and profane, male and female nudes, seated and reclining. Manet. Ritorno a Venezia is therefore an unmissable opportunity to inquire into what the fuss was about in 1865.

Guy Cogéval and Isolde Pludermacher note in the catalogue that Olympia was first compared to Titian’s Venus of Urbino in print only in 1897, by Léonce Bénédite, whereas before this, for J.-K. Huysmans, she had brought to mind Goya’s Maja desnuda. But Manet had painted a small esquisse of the Venus in Florence in 1857, and this was surely to hand when, six years later, he painted Olympia. Manet’s green and brown hangings and the red mattress are identical in colour and hue to Titian’s. The difference between them is encapsulated in the metamorphosis of Titian’s languid puppy into Manet’s tense black cat. Cogéval and Pludermacher point to ambiguity as a quality shared by the Titian and the Manet, and as a possible explanation for the latter’s controversial reception at the 1865 Salon. For some scholars, Titian’s nude is a Venus, a nuptial painting, and an augury for a fertile marriage. Yet she was also a model, painted, in however idealising a manner, from life. She appeared earlier as the charming La bella in the Pitti Palace – so charming that Guidobaldo II della Rovere apparently desired a painting of her unclothed. The modern setting, the servants foraging in a cassone, and the absence of Cupid argue against her being Venus, despite the myrtle on the window sill, and this, as well as her alluring gaze and the flowers she holds – images of her sexual favours – argue for her being a courtesan, whether the model herself was one or not. In this way the painting is no different from Manet’s.

Renaissance Venice and Second Empire Paris were both celebrated for their courtesans. Manet’s model, Victorine Meurent, was not a courtesan, even less a prostitute, impure, filleentretenue, faubourienne, lorette, cocotte, biche or any of the manifold French epithets of the time for the oldest profession: but she is represented here as one. If one disentangles the variety of responses of dismay and horror with which Olympia as well as the Luncheon on the grass were judged by contemporary critics, it would seem that the issue was that Victorine, in both, was perceived as manifestly, even brazenly, herself, the model, and was not veiled by the iconographical paraphernalia and stylistic canon of Salon ‘Eves, daughters of Lot, Judith, Bathsheba and the thousand courtesans of Solomon, as well as Venus, Europa, Danae, Leda and the thousand mistresses of Jupiter’. This is quoted in a clear-sighted catalogue essay by Roberto Calasso (author of La Folie Baudelaire) from Théophile Thoré in 1862. Consequently the harsh light and dark contours, not so different after all from Titian’s but which spuriously convinced critics of the arachnid menace of Olympia’s stubby fingers, as well as the liquid paint that provides Olympia’s facial features with their vitality, sensuality and individuality – all this was enlisted in 1865 to substantiate accusations of both moral wickedness and physical dirt. As T.J. Clark put it, ‘The nude became embarrassing . . .’. Cogéval and Pluder­macher assert that Manet’s technique in Olympia, in a retrofit of Greenbergian criticism, ‘destroys “the erotic character of the painting’”. Olympia continues to be a battleground for understanding the nature of Realism in France and the origins of Modernism.

Further juxtapositions consist of early eight­eenth-century still lifes with fish by Felice Bosetti (nos.24 and 25) with comparable motifs by Manet; Lorenzo Lotto’s Portrait of a young man in his studio (no.56; Fig.72) with Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola (no.57; Fig.73); a ridotto scene by Francesco Guardi (no.51) with Manet’s Masked ball at the opera (no.52); and two paintings from Venice’s Museo Correr: Antonello da Messina’s Christ with angels (no.32) with Manet’s watercolour of the same subject in the Musée d’Orsay (no.31) and, in what amounts to a jeu d’esprit of the curatorial team, Vittore Carpaccio’s Two Venetian women (no.49) next to Manet’s celebrated Balcony (no.50). In this last case, paintings by Goya and Manet’s recollection of his beloved Berthe Morisot in Boulogne in 1868 surely render it unnecessary to speculate that Manet visited the collection of Teodoro Correr in 1853.

The second way that the exhibition substantiates Manet’s Italian sources is in the exhibition of some oil copies (of Tintoretto’s Self-portrait, no.7, and of Titian’s Pardo Venus, no.10) and a number of drawings made from Italian paintings, whether in Florence in 1857 or in the Louvre. The catalogue rightly refers readers to Peter Meller’s article in the Feb­ruary 2002 issue of this Magazine, which authoritatively dealt with identifying Manet’s sources for his Italian sketchbooks.2 Meller dated Manet’s second Italian trip to 1857 instead of 1856 and analysed the nature of Manet’s italianità with complexity and subtlety. Amply justifying the premises of this exhibition, Meller affirmed: ‘The sheer volume of [Manet’s] Italian study materials is an index of its significance for the makeup of his art: there is no comparable documentation in his drawings of Spanish, Dutch and Flemish sources, not to speak of the French’. The only advance on Meller’s research here is the first exhibition of a sketch by Manet (no.29; discovered in a private collection in France in 2007) of Andrea del Sarto’s detached fresco of the Man of Sorrows (Cenacolo di San Salvi, Florence). Meller had associated Manet’s Christ in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, with del Sarto’s detached fresco for the first time, and hypothesised, like a scientist from CERN, the existence of a lost drawing, noting that the similarities between the fresco and the oil painting extended to the rock by Christ’s feet – which is indeed visible in Manet’s sketch.

In the catalogue, Cesare de Seta surveys Manet’s Italian sources, and Camillo Tonini vividly recreates Venice at the time of Manet’s two visits – in 1853 when he was a student and Venice was firmly in the grip of the Austrians following the failure of the 1848 revolution; and in 1874, by which time Venice was part of a unified Italy and Manet a celebrity, staying in the Grand Hotel with his wife and the painter Tissot. It was on the latter trip that he painted the Grand Canal twice, from a boat moored in front of the hotel, capturing in two Impressionistesquisses the brilliant sunlight of a Venetian September (no.80; Fig.71).

The longest and most innovative essay in the catalogue deals not with what Italy did for Manet, but what Manet did for Italy. Flavio Fergonzi opens with a discussion of Giulia Ramelli, the mystery woman with an Italian name who wrote to Manet during the 1865 Salon asking the price of Olympia; he moves on to Manet’s friendship with De Nittis; his relations with other Italians in Paris – Boldini, Signorini, Zandomeneghi and the critic Diego Martelli; the exhibi-tion in Florence in 1880 of Manet’s Laundry (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia); the championing of Manet and the Impressionists by Vittorio Pica; the descent of Manet from thecolorito of Venetian painting in Giorgione and Titian in the criticism of Roberto Longhi and Lionello Venturi; the hostility of Ardengo Soffici and Giorgio de Chirico in the period of the Return to Order; the vicis­situdes of Manet’s reputation in the 1930s; Filippo de Pisis’s passion for Manet’s painting; a Renato Guttuso à la Manet; and finally the Impressionist exhibition at the 1948 Venice Biennale.

Superbly installed by Daniela Ferretti in nine rooms of the Doge’s apartments of the Palazzo Ducale, each room with its own theme, thirty-seven perfectly lit oil paintings (twenty-three of them from the Musée d’Orsay), as well as prints, drawings and books by Manet can be enjoyed close at hand. They include several masterpieces in addition to those mentioned above: the psychologically penetrating and tragic painting of his parents Portrait of M. and Mme M. (no.16; Fig.74), whose absence from the recent show of portraits at the Royal Academy of Arts in London was lamented by the reviewer in this Magazine, The fifer (no.44),Stéphane Mallarmé (no.64), small and so much more animated than the large and rather stiff Zola nearby, the tender Berthe Morisot with a bouquet of violets (no.68), the Portrait of Clemenceau (no.72), Lola de Valence, with her astonishing bell-shaped dress and scarlet pom-pom trim (no.42), and the enigmatic Fishing (no.10), merging Annibale Carracci with Rubens. This show may remind us of Manet’s debt to the Italian Renaissance, but above all it offers the sheer pleasure of his liquid, alla prima paint, his deft brushstrokes of white for the lights (like those of Frans Hals, or better the sleeve of Jacopo Pesaro in Titian’s altarpiece in the Frari, Venice), and the deployment of a reductive chiaroscuro of two or at most three tones.

1    Catalogue: Manet. Ritorno a Venezia. Edited by Stéphane Guégan and Gabriella Belli. 250 pp. incl. 200 col. ills. (Skira, Milan, 2013), €40. ISBN 978–8–85721–8472.
2    P. Meller: ‘Manet in Italy: some newly identified sources for his early sketchbooks’, The Burlington Magazine 144 (2002), pp.68–110.