Photo: Le dejeuner sur l'herbe

Painting, as Angel González García tells us in his great essay in the Manet catalogue, gets complicated. Directness does not mean that Manet's art was a matter of getting rid of or ignoring the past. He had already copied Velázquez (sometimes erroneously, it turns out) in the Louvre, and copied and paraphrased Titian, Filippo Lippi, Rubens and Delacroix, long before he made his way to Madrid. He had also chucked out the "brown sauce" of his academic French teachers. Yet even his 1862 Music in the Tuileries, the crowded, dappled, contemporary scene under the trees, populated by his friends and acquaintances, owes something to a 17th-century Spanish painting of cavaliers. What Manet discovered specifically in Velázquez was a painterly directness, a matter of touch and application and what might appear as a withdrawal of empathy from his subjects, a kind of appraising distance that one must not mistake for objectivity. Perhaps this is what attracted Manet to Velázquez in the first place, on a human level. Importantly, in Music in the Tuileries, Manet also painted what he didn't see. He painted the patches that failed to coalesce into people, the black suits sliding into shadow, the slippage of his own eye. This is something other than what we might call impressionism. This is a different register of acuity. As a man painting the people and things about him, real people and imaginary events - a bunch of asparagus, a Spanish hat, an actor or a madwoman - Manet was also a mind painting other minds, the hidden things going on in a human confrontation. What his subjects were thinking he could only intuit and could not paint. But he could catch the outward appearance of thought. In his astonishing small 1862 painting of the reclining Jeanne Duval, Baudelaire's raddled lover, Manet looked at her across the arctic wasteland of her vast white skirt. She peers back with an impassive, hollow-eyed blankness. Like a good shrink, she doesn't say a thing. We project everything. It is not a question of whether Manet is worthy of being hung in the Prado, so much as whether he can survive it. The first encounter with Manet here, in the long boulevard of the Prado's principal gallery, provides the answer. Just as the permanent collection makes you look at Manet in long, historical perspective, against the paintings of Velázquez, the Riberas and Murillos, the Black Paintings of Goya glimpsed through an open doorway, so the presence of these Manets makes you look at everything else here differently too. Here is a place to be a flaneur. A number of Manets, mostly those painted after his return to Paris, are hung on freestanding walls, between the masterpieces. Manet's The Fifer, a painting that at first appears as direct and uncomplicated as the boy in the picture himself, is deceptive. The boy's pose is derived from a picture on a French tarot card. Knowing this makes one think there is something more here than this young boy in uniform, casting his cursory shadow on the flat grey emptiness where he plays. I want to drag in one of the fortune tellers from the nearby Retiro gardens to tell us what is meant by this boy, in this clear space that seems as much to muffle him as make him stand out. Manet once said that he had always wanted to paint pain. The pain here is not the boy's unknowable future, nor the tune which might wake the drowsy dog in Velázquez's Las Meninas, but the silence in this painting, the fact that the player will never be heard.

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