This work discusses the painting of the french painter Édouard Manet (1832 – 1883), depaerting from the intuition that, floating between two narrative blocks (the Renaissance tradition and the modern tradition; the age of the Treatises to the age of the Manifests), his painting can’t attach to the discourses on the nature pf representation inherited from the past, but it also can’t replace then by any other formulations. Thus we ask if (and how) it has been possible, for the Renaissance tradition and for the modern tradition to conceive such thing as a foundation of painting. In our analysis, we work directly with paintings such as Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863), La Nymphe surprise (1862) e L’Éxécution de Maximilien (1867), and from the reading os Manet’s inserction in the history of Modern Art (as its founder) in the writings of Georges Bataille, Clement Greenberg and Thierry de Duve.