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Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada

Artist	Édouard Manet Year	1862 Medium	Oil on canvas Dimensions	165.1 × 127.6  (65  × 50 1/4 ) Location	Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada is an 1862 oil-on-canvas painting by French artist, Édouard Manet. The painting now resides in the Metropolitan Museum of Art after it was acquired in 1929. In a triptych, Manet exhibited the painting at the 1863 Salon des Refusés alongside Jeune Homme en costume de majo and Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe. It is often recognized as a trademark of how Spanish art was an influence to Manet's art.

Subject Matter
The subject of the painting is Victorine Meurent, dressed as an espada, which is a Spanish bullfighter. Meurent is set in a bullring, with a picador mounted upon a horse as a bull prepares to attack the picador. She is about to kill the bull, as seen with a sword in her right hand. Meurent is staring directly at the viewer rather than the bull. In the far back of the painting are a group of toreros who are both watching and escaping the scene. She carries a pink cape that is not the traditional muleta color a male bullfighter would carry - her shoes are likewise untraditional.

Manet's Influences
Manet's Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada is the product of a combination of influences. The scene in the background is reminiscent of Spanish artist Francisco Goya's series of prints known as the Tauromaquia. There is a direct link to specific etchings from Goya with very few alterations on Manet's end. Plate 5 of the Tauromaquia is a direct copy of the mounted picador on the horse, with other direct references being seen in the group of toreros and the bull. The changes Manet made from Goya's prints are visible in Victorine Meurent's stance as facing away from the viewer and in the picador who is no longer a Muslim figure, but a contemporaneous one.

Meurent as the female bullfighter is more closely modeled after the Italian artist Marcantonio Raimondi's set of Virtue engravings, specifically those of the figures of Temperance and Justice. The pose of Temperance resembles Meurent's stance, whereas the position of the sword in Justice is similar to that of Manet's painting.

Themes
A common theme of Manet's oeuvre and of Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada is that of artifice. The scene shown in the painting is one of fiction, with Victorine Meurent having posed in a studio. The themes of 'dressing-up' and 'make-believe' are central to Manet's work. In an effort to shift focus from subject matter to interest in the painting alone, Manet pushes for his work to be recognized as fiction. The title of the painting itself highlights this theme of artifice by explicitly revealing that Victorine Meurent is a model posing in a costume.

Throughout Manet's early works, the adopting of motifs, settings, and figures from earlier works and artists into his own paintings was apparent. Particularly from the works of old masters, such as Titian and his painting Venus of Urbino that Manet drew influence from for his Olympia painting. The combination of artifice with borrowings from the works of earlier artists is distinctive to Manet's style.

Modern Scholarship
In the 1980s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art conducted research on an X-radiograph of Mademoiselle V. in the Costume of an Espada. The X-radiograph showed a female nude figure beneath the composition of Meurent. This female nude was upside down and shows great similarity to the one of the nude females in François Boucher's Diane sortant du bain.