Degas and Manzi's Vingt dessins: An Experimental Collaboration in Print

Degas and Manzi: a collaboration

Manzi was born in Naples in 1849 and began his career as an officer in the army, studying at the military academies of Naples and Turin. From 1870 to 1875 he was associated with the Istituto Geografico Militare in Florence where, in studying the reproduction methods of maps through typogravure, he began his lifelong interest in photomechanical processes. He returned to Turin, was promoted to captain and became a professor of topography and geometry at the Scuola di Guerra in Turin, all the while studying the process of typogravure.[xix]  Manzi immigrated to Paris, joining the heliogravure workshop of Adolphe Goupil and Théodore Van Gogh in 1881. He quickly found himself surrounded by a number of Italian expatriates including Giuseppe De Nittis, Federico Zandomeneghi and Giovanni Boldini, and became a member of the social and professional circles of Degas, Édouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Like many of his Italian brethren in Paris, Manzi enjoyed a relatively close friendship with Degas.

In addition to Manzi’s social relationship with Degas,[xx] the two were involved in business dealings, with Manzi acting both as an art dealer and collector of Degas’ works. In 1893, building upon his experiences with Goupil, Manzi had begun to dabble in art dealing, beginning with the sale of a number of Japanese paintings and antiques via the dealer Tadamasa Hayashi and a study of Danseuse by Degas to collectors in New York. Manzi was an active collector of a number of Degas’ works, owning twenty-three objects that were either part of his personal collection or part of the collection of Manzi, Joyant et Cie.

Manzi, Joyant et Cie. was an iteration of the Goupil galleries which was established in 1829 when Goupil opened a business specializing in the trade of reproductive intaglio prints.[iii] Between 1841 and 1877, Goupil expanded his offices from their original location in Paris to include branches in Berlin, Brussels, London, The Hague, Vienna and New York, and warehouses established throughout the world.[xxii]

In 1846, Goupil opened a gallery in Paris that would sell original works of art, in addition to the reproductive prints. These processes were closely linked, as Goupil would often purchase original works, have them reproduced at his print house in Asnières, and then sell the original and its reproductions through his network of branches and warehouses. The purchase of the original guaranteed Goupil the exclusive rights to reproduce the images. The process of purchasing and disseminating the works through reproduction not only produced revenue for Goupil, but the sales of the reproductions also drove up the price of the original.

In 1884, Manzi became the director of the Asnières branch of Goupil & Cie., where they had been experimenting with the photogravure method since 1882. In 1884, under the guidance of Manzi, they were able to refine the nuanced reproduction of an original work of art in a process that would come to be called chromogravure.

The April 1884 issue of Bulletin de la société française de photographie, contained an announcement praising the photogravures perfected by Goupil & Cie., noting that the remarkable method made great strides in the mechanical reproduction of photographs. Accompanied by a reproduction of a drawing by Édouard Detaille, the review functioned as propaganda for the new process. It emphasized the novel techniques of reproduction and the remarkable results in closely replicating the nuances of the accompanying drawing. [xxiii] A year later, Léon Vidal, writing for the Moniteur de la photographie, reviewed the addition of color to the image in gravures, noting:

Nothing is sacrificed, neither the purity of the drawing, neither the great vigor of the most intense shades, nor the soft half-tones of the most diaphanous transparencies of the most vaporous backgrounds… It is a pity not to be able to scratch a nail into these perceived thicknesses of color to ensure that they are a perfect reproduction. [xxiv]


This method, perfected by Manzi in the 1880s, became the preferred technique of mechanically reproducing a variety of two-dimensional works in La Revue des lettres et des arts, Le Figaro illustré and many Goupil publications. It was this process, with its emphasis on the reproduction of the nuances of line and color that provided the foundation for the successful publication of Vingt dessins.

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