Thus the difference between the youthful works of Manet and those of his predecessor Courbet is the difference between Velasquez and Caravaggio. Of course, in Manet's earliest pictures there were found the broad, dull red-brown surfaces which characterise the works of the Bolognese and the Neapolitans. A cool silver tone, a shadowless treatment gleaming in silver, has now taken the place of this warm brown sauce. He has the white of Velasquez, his cool subdued rose-colour, his delicate grey which has been so much admired and against which every touch of colour stands out clear and determined, and that celebrated black of the Spaniard which is never heavy and dull, but makes such a light and transparent effect. What is bright is contrasted with what is bright, and light colours are placed upon a silvery grey background. The most perfect modelling and plastic effect is attained without the aid of strong contrasts of shadow. Thus he closed his apprenticeship to the old masters by being able to see with the eyes of that old master whose vision was the truest. [Illustration: MANET. A GARDEN IN RUEIL.] This was the point of departure for Manet's further development. The study of Velasquez did not merely set him free from sauce; it also started the problem of painting light. He went through a course of development similar to that of the old Spaniard himself. When Velasquez painted his first picture with a popular turn, the "Bacchus," he still stood upon the ground of the tenebrous painters; he represented an open-air scene with the illumination of a closed room. Although the ceremony is taking place in broad daylight, the people seem to be sitting in a dingy tavern, receiving light from a studio window to the left. Ten years afterwards, when he painted "The Smithy of Vulcan," he had emancipated himself from this Bolognese tradition, which he spoke of henceforward as "a gloomy and horrible style." The deep and sharply contrasted shadows have vanished, and daylight has conquered the light of the cellar. The great equestrian portraits which followed gave Mengs occasion to remark, even a hundred years ago, that Velasquez was the first who understood how to paint what is "ambiant," the air filling the vacuum between objects. And at the end of his life he solved the final problem in "The Women Spinning." In the "Bacchus" might be found the treatment of an open-air scene in the key of sauce, but here was the glistening of light in an interior. The sun quivers over silken stuffs, falls upon the dazzling necks of women, plays through coal-black Castilian locks, renders one thing plastically distinct and another pictorially vague, dissolves corporeality, and lends surface the rounding of life. Contours touched with the brightness of light surround the heads of the girls at work. The shadows are not warm brown but cool grey, and the tints of reflected light play from one object to another.