I assure you no art was ever less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperamenttemperament is the word -1 know nothing.'2 E dgar Degas set out for Italy in July [856. This study trip, prompted solely by his own desires, was to last for three years, an intense period in which he threw himself with a passion into the study of classical sculpture and the Italian paintings of the fourteenth, fifteenth and

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... th centuries. He copied some of the art he saw into six notebooks: mostly rough sketches as an aide mémoire.3 He also practised by making detailed drawings of certain Italian paintings and sculptures he admired. Here Degas was following academic teaching methods, imitating the classics in order to emulate them, creating his own inventions based on the knowledge he had acquired. In his choice of works of art, too, he initially followed the academic canon by focusing primarily on fifteenthand sixteenth-century Italian art.4 But there in Italy, surprisingly, he also made a portrait and a series of etched and painted self-portraits inspired by those of the young Rem brandt (figs. I and 2). Like Rembrandt, Degas was about twenty-three years old and at the start of an illustrious career. Degas's interest in Rembrandt at this point in his life is intriguing, for Detail of fig. 1