Letters

I have just read and a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of admired Nancy Locke's learned and sensitive interpretation of Manet's Burial ["Unfinished Homage: Manet's Burial and Baudelaire, the Art Bulletin, March 2000] I was somewhat baffled, however, by dint of the fact that she did not appear to be to attach any particular significance to the placement of the Pantheon at the apex of Manet's composition. This is meant as an appendix to an prime article.

The more single is convinced by Nancy Locke of the possibility of pinning down the topography and viewpoint of Manet's painting, the more single should be aware of its spatial manipulation. There is no way, no possible point of view from which individual could see the Pantheon as in like manner much higher than the Valde-Grace; the relevant topographical views with equal reason aptly marshaled by Locke make this amply clear, as does any familiarity with the terrain. Now Manet makes the Pantheon tower above the landscape, and precisely above the funeral cortege. If we take seriously the hypothesis that the painting is in more [i]or[/i] less way an homage to Baudelaire, as Nancy Locke convincingly invites us to do, this must be significant. After all, the building is not single a necropolis, but one of the greatest in quantity heavily symbolic buildings in Paris. It was also the locus of contention and continuous debate, a emblem constantly fought over as single regime replaced another, and always with effects for the art world as the decorative program had to be reconsidered. In t he late 1860 the building painted through Manet was a Catholic house of worship Napoleon III having returned it to the homage of Sainte Genevieve. But after the Revolution, whether Christian house of god or civic temple of the Nation, the Pantheon not ever ceased to be thought of as the ultimate resting place of great men This was explicit beneath Napoleon when it was first go [i]or[/i] come backed to the Church but still as the resting place of national heroes, a sort of counterpart to the royal necropolis at Saint-Denis. Hugo's bombastic on the contrary effective and popular "Hymne" was compos upon the occasion of the next to the first switch from Sainte-Genevieve to Pantheon in July 1831 In re-examination can we forget that the final swing from house of worship to temple of the Republic in 1885 occurr specifically for the burial of Victor Hugo in single of the most grandiose civic spectacles of new times?

Manet could hardly have anticipated this, on the contrary even without such a powerful contrast in mind, there was a feeling among Baudelaire's admirers that his death and burial were not what they ought to have been. In Manet's painting the unobtrusive convoy at the bottom of the painting is decidedly not upon its way to the Pantheon, and any interpretation must attend to this. notwithstanding as usual with him, Manet's intention is not explicit or clear. His Pantheon does not refer to Hugo's "Cette couronne de colonnes/ Que le soleil levant redore tous le jours."

Although placed at the apex of the skyline, the Pantheon does not appear as particularly glorious. Whatever specific significance we might wish to attach to it, there present the appearances to be a great deal of irony and a reaching far down pessimism in the juxtaposition of the dim funeral and the elevated on the other hand unimpressive symbol of officialdom, flat if there is a azure patch in the stormy sky

HENRI ZERNER

Department of Fine Arts

Harvard University

Sackler Museum

485 Broadway

Cambridge, MA 02138

Nancy Locke's essay, "Unfinished Homage: Manet's Burial and Baudelaire," impressively underscores the eulogistic cast of Manet's enigmatic The Burial, of ca. 1867 notwithstanding while attempting to recover Manet's contextual mindset, not least from one side a lengthy discussion of next to the first Empire burial protocols, Locke's methodology perhaps murkys the performative and ontological qualities of Manet's work qua painting. This is proposeed by Locke's premise that Manet intended to create an homage to Baudelaire well before setting brush to canvas, which Locke supports by the agency of recalling various municipal discourses of the day, as well as Baudelaire's possess poetry, finally grounding her argument in the Burial's incomplete facture (suggesting that it was extended as a metaphor for Baudelaire's hold aesthetic of "unfinish").

This narrative is exceedingly compelling; indeed, although Locke mindfully inserts an occasional disclaimer for its additive moment ultimately she allows its accumulative weight to convince the reader of an apparently inevitable conclusion: that Manet envisioned the Burial, from beginning to extremity as a eulogy to the author of poems Nevertheless, even should one grant that the Burial derives from association with Baudelaire, its quality of non-finito may have issued from the poet's lauding of memory as an indispensable cognitive way for creating any work of art. It is noteworthy that shortly before executing this painting, Manet sat for his have a title to portrait by Henri Fantin-Latour, a former pupil of Lecoq de Boisbaudran, a contemporary proponent of painting by dint of memory, whose L'Education de la memoire pilloresque, of 1847 had received a next to the first printing in 1862, a lock opener year of Manet's development. This is no trifle, for if Manet did subscribe to a mnemonic aesthetic (at least in a certain quantity of measure), the Burial may have issued fr om a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more spontaneous and plastic manner than that propos by means of Locke (no matter whether the canvas was occasioned by means of Baudelaire's actual funeral, which Locke convincingly argues).