On a visit to Venice, exasperated by the endless allegorical pictures and scenes from Gerusalemma Liberata and Orlando Furioso and “all that rubbish,” Edouard Manet is supposed to have told an artist friend that “a painter can say all he wants to with fruit or flowers or even clouds.” It is a straightforward statement about art-making right up there with Caravaggio’s reported assertion that “there was as much ‘workmanship’ in a still life as in a figure.” These succinct observations collapse the passage of time, offering vivid evidence that despite the seemingly unbridgeable accumulation of years separating them from each other, both Manet and his seventeenth-century predecessor were concerned with the same pragmatic, formal, hands-on issues that have always engaged serious, working painters— even serious, working painters who also happened to have changed the course of art history.

This is not to wrench either artist out of context. Whether or not Caravaggio believed that in terms of sheer painterly engagement baskets of fruit and musical instruments required “as much workmanship” as any other part of a picture, the still lifes that he painted with such inventiveness and virtuosity are usually subservient in his canvases to the androgynous youths, be-plumed bravi, and ambiguous saints who enact his tense dramas—which is to be expected in an era when an artist was judged by his ability to paint large-scale figures. Such hierarchical categories of worth were becoming less rigid by the 1860s when Manet began to exhibit, but at the