The Italians, on their part, ridiculed the ignorance of the French art historians. But behind this quarrel was buried a more rooted emotional sentiment, where the since the Napoleonic war artistically humiliated Italians finally could laugh back with the help of their glorious Renaissance past. But, as the incidents with Courbet and Manet, and the rest of the Nine­teenth-Century has shown, even though the battle was won by the Italian art critics, the war on the concept of art was definitely lost to Paris.