"Bandillero"- a bullfighter's assistant who weakens the bull for the main bullfighter 
"Capote"- a cape that is magenta and yellow used by "bandilleros" to attract the bulls to study for the fight; "matadors" then use the cape to attract the bull for the two to fight
"Corrida"- bullfight; "corrida de toros" is the expert level of bullfighting
"Espada"- a sword, or another term for "matador" used in Spain 
"Majo"- charming, good-lucking, "majestic" man 
"Matador"- the bullfighter; in Spain and Mexico, bullfighters or "matadors" are considered national celebrities like American national sports heros
"Muelta"- a red cape over a stick that the "matador" uses at the end of the fight before he kills the bull with a sword
"Picador"- a mounted fighter on horse back with a spear, or "vara," who injures the bull to weaken it for the bullfigher to perform passes
"Torero"- a bullfighter 
"Vara"- a spear used by a "picador"
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(Left) Diego Velazquez, Pablo de Valladolid, c. 1635. Oil on Canvas. Museo Prado, Madrid.
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The opera Carmen depicts a tragic love story set in Seville, Spain about a country girl and her conflicting love interests. Appealing to their exotic taste, Carmen exposed the traditions of gypies and the bullfight to 19th century French, cultured society. Increasing French curiosity about the bullfight, the character Escamillo (the bullfighter) sings one of the most famous songs from Carmen, the "Toreador Song". The popularity and genuis of Prosper Merimee and Georges Bizet's masterpiece, inspired Eduoard Manet to use these themes in many of his early and late works. Manet's portrait of The Gypsy with a Cigarette, which hangs in the Princeton University Art Museum, portrays a gypsy similiar to Carmen, the cigarette factory worker(Bois 13 and 78). Illustrating a Carmen-like gypsy vallidates Manet's interest in the opera Carmen, and its foreign, Spanish themes. The work, like his other early works, reflects the exotic character in a pose rather than in action. This supplements the fact that Manet represented exotic portraits and posed works as theatrical spectacles.
Continuing his love for Spanish culture well after his trip to Spain, Manet, in 1880, painted the opera singer, Emilie Ambre. Ambre commissioned Manet to paint her as her favorite character, Carmen (152). In Portrait of Emilie Ambre in the Role of Carmen, Manet returns to the theatrical side in pose and costume of Spanish culture. However, this work reaffirms his interest in Spanish pop culture which apparently had stayed in France since the mid- 19th century..JPG)
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However, did Manet really go to Spain to only study the works by Spanish masters? Did he really change his presentation of the bullfights? A Matador (1865-1867) appears to follow the Velazquez portrait style with the posed matador saluting in a dark, airy setting, illustrating that maybe the trip reaffirmed his "inclination" toward Spanish technique. However, this work contradicts true Velazquez- type portraits. Manet did use the dark, ambiguous portrait setting, but the matador's pose does not look as fake or as rigid as the previous espada or majo works. In those works, the characters do not interact with the bullfight; they look at the viewer instead of the bullfight event. In A Matador, Manet catches the matador saluting and interacting with his bullfighting audience, not the viewer. Manet shows the matador as an active character in the bullfight rather than a passive, theatrically posed figure. If this work were created before his visit, Manet may not have felt as passionately about reflecting the interaction of the audience and the bullfighters. Manet had to have been moved by the thrill of the bullfight in the Madrid culture because his works after visiting Spain become more interactive and more insightful. He achieves this intimacy by depicting bullfight in-the-moment-action poses rather than interpretive stances of previous travel accounts of Spain and old Spanish master works. Manet had to visit Spain to derive his own explanations of bullfights and Spanish culture through experience. 
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The fact that Manet chose to tell Baudelaire that he would "put on canvas" the event that he "saw" explicitly indicates his shift to depicting authentic bullfights. To recreate the "terrifying sight," in The Bullfight (1865-66) and The Bullfight (1865-67) the bullfighters demonstrate different evocative moments in a bullfight. In The Bullfight (1865-66), Manet illustrates the moment of the horrifying death of the horse by the bull. He depicts the "bull's horns ploughing" into the horse in the middle of the ring. Manet portrays the worried bullfighting characters in the background in frantic running motions, which emphasizes the "glittering effect" of facing death. The later The Bullfight (1865-67) captures the toreador in a pose of action. Turning his back toward the audience, the toreador heroically encounters the staring bull. By capturing this moment and these positions, the artist evokes the intense sensation of being in the bullfighting ring. The bullfighting "bien suerte" pose, which literally means the good luck pose in Spanish, highlights the heightened awareness of this life or death moment (Ramon 35). Sharply contrasting the earlier "espada" work, the characters in the bullring do not appear to be acting. The bullfighter actually interacts with the bull in a come-hither position and not just a half-effort brandishing lunge. These "brilliant, glittering" images of moments of decisions and reactions could only be reproduced by someone who experienced the event. This blatant shift from theatrical spectacle to dramatic reality enforces Manet's independent and more authentic interpretation of the bullfights. These works epitomize that by witnessing an authentic bullfight, Manet could use his experience to create powerful images that engage audiences with the bullfight rather than view actors posing as bullfighters, as he had been forced to do in his earlier works. Manet's ability to engage the audience with the bullfight signified his progression toward more modern and contemporary works..jpg)
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The Salon recognized his ignorance of the bullfight. In the Salon of 1864, he entered the Incident at the Bullfight. The painting was not only rejected, but highly criticized for not looking like a convincing bullfight. He then cut the work into two, creating The Bullfight and The Dead Toreador (Hoenigswald). Even inside a bullfight ring the bullfight looks more like a theater production than a depiction of an authentic Spanish tradition. The rigidly posed bullfighters in The Bullfight (1864) magnify the problem of staged bullfighting in Manet's works. The characters hold typical bullfight poses, but there is no significant fear or contact with the bull. Specifically, in The Dead Toreador (1864), the dead figure lies flat on his back in a dark setting. Displacing the figure from the bullring all together makes his death unrelated to the bull. The cold, prone pose of the dead toreador does not physically connect with the trauma caused by the bullfight. Instead it highlights the inauthentic acting of the arbitrary toreador actor. The failure of the intended works of the once Incident at the Bullfight demonstrate Manet's unconvincing portrayal of bullfighting due to his dependence on previous Spanish works by Velazquez and Goya and 19th century travel literature. He had to change in order to impress audiences..jpg)
After his Salon works were criticized profusely in 1864 and 1865, Manet searched for help. Attacking his Spanish works, an art critic, Theophile Thore, argued that Manet was "unoriginal" and designed "pastiches" of Velazquez, Goya and El Greco rather than authentic renditions of bullfighting scenes (Hyslop 207). The hurt Manet begged for advice from Baudelaire who answered him frankly by noting that his demand was "really stupid" (qtd. in Hyslop 221). Baudelaire pointed out that many great artists were "scoffed at" and that he should learn to deal with criticism. And so Manet did. Instead of sulking in Paris after the Salon of 1865, he made a trip to Spain in late summer for a couple of weeks. Though art historians like Juliet Wilson-Bareau believe that "his primary reason for going there was to see a great many authentic works by Velazquez" (Manet by Himself 234), Manet's letters and works after his trip reflect his true desire to experience an authentic Spanish bullfight. If he could experience a bullfight, he could express his own observations rather than relying on the interpretations of travel accounts and old masters in his depiction of this respect of Spanish culture.
characters in the works. Specifically, his women in the sketch of a Young Woman in a Toreador's Costume (1862) and Mme. V… in the Costume of an Espada stress the theatrical spirit of the bullfight to Manet by showing females as bullfighters. Females do not fight in traditional bullfights; therefore, by posing females in male-only bullfighting positions, Manet automatically eliminated convincing physical character interaction in his bullfights. By representing a female posing as a male bullfighting hero, Manet did not present the authentic fight of the bullfight, mocking it as a theatrical spectacle. This clearly shows that Manet used the bullfight theme only to whet the Spanish appetite of his potential audience. Manet's ignorance toward authenticity reflects his interest in promoting the exotica of the bullfight in order to attract praise from viewers. Due to the abundance of nearly two decades worth of exotica inspired by the Spanish works of the Louvre, posed- Spanish scenes were exhausted. Audiences wanted to experience the excitement that they read in travel accounts rather than only look at costumes. Manet's unconvincing bullfight scenes with inactive-fight characters did not communicate authenticity, which turned off audiences. .jpg)
Manet continued to pose characters as bullfighters but not engage them physically in the actual fight. As seen in Young Man in the Costume of a Majo (1863), Manet depicts his brother posing as a stagnate majo. Wilson-Bareau in Manet and Spain refers to Manet's act of using Spanish costume as "hispancizing Frenchmen" (224). The figure stands with a pole and majo costume to just appear Spanish. He does not engage in a bullfight or bullfight event, he stares off toward the side of the picture. This plain stance does not convey a sense of bullfighting, just a chic Spanish costume. The lack of authenticity in the majo and other "costume" works enforces Manet's ignorance of the essence of bullfighting. Bullfighting remains fantastical in Manet's eyes because he only expresses his affinity toward the bullfight-concept that he has read about and seen, but not experienced. 
First, to understand Manet's bullfights, the foundation for his Spanish taste must be established. After years of Moorish rule and political uncertainty, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella formulated a homogeneous, prosperous Spanish society, which reached its Golden Age of international reverence under Phillip II in the late 16th century. Spain's exclusivity began to unravel under Bourbon rule in the 18th century and completely eroded by the Napoleonic War (Phillips). The French control of Spain in conjunction with the growing popularity of Romanticism during the 19th century created a revived French interest in Spanish culture. Gautier, a Romantic essayist and poet, traveled to Spain and wrote numerous travel accounts of his "exotic" encounter. His Spanish fascination influenced Prosper Merimee's novel Carmen, publicized Francisco Goya to the French art sphere, and sparked curiosity about bullfighting (Isaacson 9). In 1839, King Louis-Phillipe, requested the installation of a Spanish painting exhibit, which included works by Velazquez and El Greco. This exhibition remained in the Louvre for nearly ten years, influencing many mid-19th century artists to re-create Spanish themed works for the Salon (Rich 1-2). .jpg)
Manet capitalized on his interest in Spanish culture and the French demand for "all things Spanish" to gain respect in the art world and acceptance by the Salon. The Salon and its jury, funded by the French government during the 19th century, decided what works were "good" enough to endorse in the annual exhibit. Despite the fact that it held on to more traditional art ideals, artists competed to appeal to and exhibit with the Salon to gain national and critical praise to help their artistic careers (Duro). As noted before, Spanish themes were revered by French society during the 1850s and 1860s; even Baudelaire idealized the Romantic art of Goya (Hanson 80). He approved of Manet's interest in Spanish technique by noting that Manet was a "Spanish genius taking refuge in France (qtd. in Armstrong 96)." Inspired by Baudelaire's praise and Spanish popularity, Manet created Spanish themed paintings to submit to the Salon. The Salon accepted and awarded an honorable mention to his very Spanish themed, The Spanish Singer, in 1861 (Isaacson 12). The success of the Spanish theme, increase of audience demand, and training in Spanish technique influenced Manet to expand his depiction of the Spanish culture to the ultimate Spanish tradition, bullfighting. After reading travel reports about bullfights, Manet used his imagination (and copying of Velazquez and Goya) to recreate the bullfight scenes (Armstrong 97).