Manet and 19th-Century French Painting at Palazzo Reale, Milan

A major exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan explores Édouard Manet and 19th-century French painting, featuring over 100 works including 16 paintings and 11 drawings by Manet. The show contextualizes Manet within the modernization of Paris after the fall of the Napoleonic Empire, highlighting the city's transformation through architecture and bourgeois social life. Manet's innovative, realistic style—compared by Renoir to Giotto and Cimabue—depicted the gritty yet glamorous urban scene, drawing parallels to Baudelaire's poetry. The exhibition also includes works by contemporaries such as Renoir, Stevens, Tissot, Morisot, Gauguin, Monet, Degas, and Signac, offering a broad overview of Impressionism and the shift toward everyday subjects like riverside outings and opera evenings. Contrasting academic works by Lequesne and Navlet are also on view. The exhibition runs until an unspecified date in 2017.