Early Chapters Discussion: Manet's Le Dejeuner

[Jessica]

Why do you think Manet used Raphael's The Judgment of Paris to structure Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe? Was it a tip of the hat to Raphael -- the most revered of all the Old Masters -- or was he deliberately being irreverent and provocative?

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[Jessica]

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Jessica wrote: Why do you think Manet used Raphael's The Judgment of Paris to structure Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe? Was it a tip of the hat to
Raphael -- the most revered of all the Old Masters -- or was he deliberately being irreverent and provocative?

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Maybe a little of both?

Remember, for The Judgment of Paris, Raphael reversed Michelangelo's figures from The Creation of Adam. Perhaps this theme of "borrowing and updating" appealed to Manet.

I also like to think he was being irreverent and provacative -- clothing the men in current fashions that some people felt weren't majestic or dignified enought to be included in a serious work of art; replacing military symbols (the helmet, etc) with the leftovers of a picnic basket; using a model who was generally (and unfairly, I think) considered ugly...

I can't nail it down, I guess. What does everyone else think?

Jessica
Book Club Editor

[Mariposa]

I think a lot of artists borrowed and updated. Some more intentionally than others. I read in The Judgment of Paris that many artists would go to the Louvre and copy old masters to learn technique. This was common practice. So they internalized what they saw and what they sketched. I believe this was considered to be a compliment to the original artist.

But Manet's changes were very radical. For example, the clothing of the men was contemporary and they were clothed, unlike Rafael's work. I like this line: "He (referring to Manet) was not simply copying Rafael--he was cheekily reworking him, turning a mythological scence from one of the most celebrated engravings of the Renaissance into a tableau of somewhat vulgar Parisian holidaymakers in whom the morally fastidious might detect indecent overtones." (41) I underlined the word "cheekily" for emphasis when I first read that line.

Lizabeth

[ross_king]

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dianearbus wrote:
I think a lot of artists borrowed and updated. Some more intentionally than others.

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There's a long and distinguished history of artists copying other artists. As I show in Chapter 4, Manet may have been copying Raphael for the poses of his figures, but Raphael was copying Michelangelo’s Adam in the Sistine Chapel ... and Michelangelo (as I show in Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling) was copying Jacopo della Quercia’s Adam on the church of San Petronio in Bologna.

So it's a good thing there are no plagiarism lawsuits in art, or we'd have very few pictures to look at!

These copyings, or what art historians call “quotations,” sometimes appear in very unexpected places. I recently read Susan Vreeland’s new novel, Luncheon of the Boating Party, about Renoir’s famous painting of the same name. This canvas seems to be a perfect snapshot of modern life, 1880s style, but Vreeland points out that Renoir was at least partly inspired by a work in the Louvre, Veronese’s Marriage at Cana, painted 300 years earlier. You can make the comparison:

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/R/renoir/boating.jpg.html

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/V/veronese/cana_dtl_guests.jpg.html

So, despite the fact that Manet and the Impressionists defied convention, they were happy to use, and to rework, time-honored images, poses and ideas. Maybe it’s impossible to make a complete break with the past?