“Modern Painters, Old Masters argues persuasively that artists have succeeded in reimagining earlier work without engaging in aggressive competition—the kind that Édouard Manet, for example, appears to have relished when he transformed the softly modeled nude in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) into the flat planes of a defiantly naked Olympia (1863)… Like the nineteenth century, our own moment is one at which the expansion of museums and new technologies for the dissemination of images have combined to make the history of art-making open to view as never before.”