How Manet was influenced by the artists of the Renaissance

Manet’s paintings were regularly rejected by the Salon, yet he continued to submit them and declined to exhibit with the Impressionists, who regarded him as a father figure. Even when his works were accepted by the Salon, they were routinely received with outrage among both critics and the public. This response baffled him.

When his ‘Olympia’ was shown at the Salon in 1865, along with his ‘Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers’, Edouard Manet wrote to Baudelaire in exile in Brussels: ‘I wish I could have your sound judgment on my pictures, because all this uproar is upsetting, and obviously someone must be wrong.’ And to Antonin Proust he said: ‘Only a fool could think I’m out to create a sensation.’

Ironically, although during his lifetime Manet was considered by many to be a dangerous radical, no artist manifested a greater reverence for the Old Masters. The influence of Spanish art on his work, especially of Velázquez and Goya, was recognised at the time — unsurprisingly, given the explicit Spanish scenes in his oeuvre.