Velázquez and the Spanish effect.

There is a well-worn but important story regarding the posthumous appreciation of one of history's greatest painters, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez. Invited by the king of Spain to view Las Meninas, the Italian painter Luca Giordano was struck dumb by the sight of Velázquez's masterpiece. Momentarily unable to give his opinion about the painting, Giordano steeled himself and coined a phrase that has endured nearly three centuries. "Sire," he told the king after the initial shock wore off, "this is the theology of painting."

Uttered many years after the death of Velázquez, Giordano's golden-tongued assessment of one of the world's greatest works of art betrays a tardiness that the Met's current exhibition, "Manet/Velázquez", would find typical of the historical response to the painting of Spain's Golden Age. An examination of the late but immeasurable impact of 17th-century Spanish painting on French art of the 19th, the show traces artistic influence across a terrain that represents not so much a chronology of civilized progress as a set of durable lessons in realpolitik.

A brilliantly bountiful gathering of over 240 Spanish and Spanish-inflected works which include masterpieces by Murillo, Ribera, El Greco, Zurbarán, Goya, Delacroix, Courbet, Millet, Degas, Sargent, Chase, Eakins and Whistler, "Manet/Velázquez" focuses on the twin lodestars of painterly realism and their encounter across a span of several hundred years. A look at a pivotal epoch in Western art, when French artists of the 19th century shifted away from the Renaissance idealism represented by Raphael toward the naturalism of the Spanish Baroque (setting the course, the argument goes, for French Realism, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism), "Manet/Velázquez" presents this significant shift complete with its companion history of wars, looting and rampant acquisitiveness.

Few historical exhibitions are as thorough as "Manet/Velázquez" in outlining the nasty, necessary bits involved in cultural sea changes. For example, few instances match the covetousness of the French and their emperor, Napoleon?the exhibition's not-so-hidden agent?during France's bloody occupation of Spain. Marshal Soult, the most rapacious but discerning villain among Napoleon's generals, stole 999 paintings from the various palaces, monasteries and private homes of Seville. Other events, like the founding of the Louvre and the Prado museums as well as the short-lived Galerie Espagnole, turn out to have been largely cultural expressions of nationalist aspirations in a no less expansionist guise. The point of all this was for France and her artists to possess the finest, most valuable art in the world. Where they succeeded, particularly with Spanish art, a turning point in the history of ideas was ushered in. The Spanish effect was a first-rank case of looking back to make it new again, and remade painting in the West and, with it, our view of the world's visual possibilities.

The late arrival of Spanish art in Paris "had the effect," Baudelaire wrote in 1846, "of increasing the volume of general ideas you had to have about art." The new paradigm suggested by the Spaniards was in short supply until mid-century and consisted, loosely speaking, of a greater intensity of vision, bracingly direct depictions of ordinary reality and a sketchier, more expressive handling of paint, all of which bucked the strictures of the Salonistes' classically inspired beau ideal. The works of Murillo, Ribera, El Greco, Zurbarán, Goya and particularly Velázquez were central in the battle to determine the direction of Realist figurative painting, and gave French artists access to an impeccable, alternative tradition with which to depict an encroaching modernity.

It's not difficult to imagine, under the circumstances, the excitement felt by an artist like Courbet at "discovering" a nearly 200-year-old painting like Murillo's elegant portrait of the young gentleman Don Andrés de Andrade y la Cal in the plush galleries of the Louvre. Echoes of the Spaniard's dark face and frizzy locks appear in two self-portraits by the artist, as well as in his famous Burial at Ornans, a purposefully direct and homespun rendition of a middle-class funeral. Degas, for his part, made copies after Las Meninas and several paintings in the Iberian style, like the portrait of the black-clad, Spanish guitarist Lorenzo Pagans currently on view at the Met.

The idea that the goal of creative effort lay outside the field of allegory and moral precept was not only new but radical by the mid-19th century when the French Realists began coming into their own. The Met's exhibition, as chock-full of treasures as any exhibition in recent memory, goes a long way to drawing a complete picture of the Hispanophilic roots of French modernism. Of the dozen works by Velázquez on view, the full-length portraits of dwarfs, court jesters and philosophers in rags, like Aesop and Menippus, decant perfectly into Manet's modern paintings of beggars and urban types like his Absinthe Drinker?though only one of them was thinking about 19th-century poverty and alienation.

On a visit to the Prado of the sort that became requisite for young artists, Manet called another of Velázquez paintings, The Jester Pablo de Valladolid, "the most extraordinary piece of painting that has ever been done."

"There's nothing but air surrounding the fellow," he described in a letter to a friend. That single liberating idea served Manet well in paintings like The Fifer and the portrait of his bohemian friend Marcellin Desboutin. His simplified, flattened planes and blank backgrounds are modern versions of old Spanish subjects; they face forward today with an ambiguity and frankness that was unprecedented in their time.

Alongside these paintings at the Met are others sure to blow anyone's socks off. Also from Manet's hand, there is one of the three versions of The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian, one of the greatest history paintings ever made; a portrait of the novelist Emile Zola, littered with references to Velázquez as well as to his own work; and a gorgeous portrait of his sister-in-law, the painter Berthe Morisot, painted with what can only be called exquisite economy. As something of a tacked-on coda to what the exhibition's subtitle calls "The French Taste for Spanish Painting," "Manet/Velázquez" also entertains American reactions to the French adaptation of the Spanish style. Several wonderful Whistlers, a fabulously blurry portrait of Whistler by William Merritt Chase, and two dazzling paintings by Sargent?including the intensely Velázquez-like The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit?provide witness to the radiating effect of the vagaries of artistic influence. Latecomers to innovations forged by French contemporaries, these artists and many others took a page out of nearly forgotten history to fulfill their profoundly contemporary aspirations.

"Manet/Velázquez: The French Taste for Spanish Painting" through June 8 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 5th Ave. (82nd St.), 212-535-7710.