Head of a young man after the self-portrait by Filippo Lippi

Painted c.1853 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, this early copy after a detail from Filippo Lippi's self-portrait reflects Manet's student years when he undertook intensive copying in the Louvre and during his 1853 study trip to Italy. European museums sent gifted students to copy old masters as part of their training, and Manet was an exceptionally attentive student who absorbed lessons from Titian, Velázquez, Rembrandt, and Dutch genre painters. This copy after a fifteenth-century Florentine painter documents the breadth of his historical study. The Orsay preserves it as evidence of how Manet's modernism emerged from a thorough grounding in the tradition he would later subvert.

The copy demonstrates Manet's acute sensitivity to the handling qualities of earlier painting — he captures the Florentine early Renaissance tendency toward clear, relatively flat tonality and precise contour. The paint application is more meticulous than his mature work, reflecting both the model's influence and the careful attention of copying. The warm flesh tones and strong linear definition reflect the fifteenth-century source faithfully.