The great tradition has got lost,” Baudelaire wrote in 1846. Deservedly so, he suggested, for it had become the “dogma of the studios,” the cause of “the present decadence in painting.” It involved the “idealization of ancient life,” picturing individuals with a certain “gravity” in their “movements” and “majesty” in their “attitudes.”1 Yet modern life, with its crowds of “floating existences,”2 is not so ideal. “By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent,” Baudelaire wrote, arguing that tradition means “the eternal and the immutable.”3 Old master art extended the great tradition, but “every old master has his own modernity.” Nonetheless, he held up the old masters as models for the new masters, for they were able to find the eternal and immutable in their modernity: ephemeral life became eternally beautiful in their art. But the new modernity was more “absolutely ugly” than the old modernity, making the aesthetic “task of distilling from it the mysterious element of beauty”—the sign of the eternal and immutable—“that it may contain, however slight or minimal that element may be,”4 more difficult. (Baudelaire thought of himself as a midwife to the “tradition of the new,” as it has come to be called, “not yet established” in his day, as he noted, but now the establishment art.)