Manet as Tintoretto
Manet, Copy after Tintoretto's Self-Portrait (1854)
A large number of Manet's early copies after other masters are either self-portraits or depictions of other artists. Art is often the apparent subject. One of his copies is Tintoretto's Self-Portrait (above), of which Carol Armstrong, a Manet specialist, has made this very interesting observation. Tintoretto as an old man, she writes, "has elderly features very much like Manet's youthful ones."1
Did Manet choose to copy Tintoretto because of the resemblance? I think so.
1. Carol Armstrong, Manet Manette (Yale University Press) 2002, p. 26
Posted 05 Nov 2010: Artist as Another ArtistManetTintorettoPortraitureTheory
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