Olympia, Manet, 1863, oil on canvas

“The vicious strangeness of this woman of the night”, “a sort of female gorilla”, “such indecency”—these are a sampling of actual lines thrown around in May 1865 when Edouard Manet displayed his Olympia in the Salon of Paris in 1865. It was met with shock, jeers, criticism, and disdain. It was verbally and physically attacked by the public, art critics, and newspapers. Guards were stationed next to the painting to protect it from harm, before it was moved to a spot high above a doorway, out of the reach of the mob.

Olympia features a reclining nude woman, attended by a maid and a black cat, gaze leveled squarely at the viewer. Taken as their own, these elements are hardly shocking, given the sophistication of the Paris gallery crowd which was accustomed to the naked female form as depicted in Renaissance art. Olympia was in fact, modeled after Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), which was in turn modeled after Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510).

Sleeping Venus, Giorgione, oil on canvas, 1510

The strong objections to Olympia had more to do with the realism of the subject matter than the fact that the subject was nude. Manet borrowed the classic precedence of the pose, but unlike his peers, he did not choose to depict a goddess or an odalisque—Olympia was no Venus or Danae, but a working class girl shown to be precisely what she was: a high-class prostitute waiting for a client. The oriental shawl she lies on, the orchid in her hair. Her bracelet and pearl earrings. The flowers in the arms of the black servant, gifts from a client.

The frankness of both the gaze of the nude as rendered by Manet as well as the unvarnished subject matter shocked the public in its time and has continued to intrigue contemporary audiences—Beth Brombert sums up several contemporaneous observations by noting that the nude’s expression was critical to the work: “What may have offended the viewer of 1865 far more than the painting’s disregard for established techniques of modeling and half tones is the brazen look that defies the male gawker. ‘You may buy my favors,’ she seems to be saying, ‘if I choose to grant them, but only I own me.’ “

With general contemporary exposure to nudity and shifting attitudes towards sex, it is noteworthy that Olympia continues to impress viewers with merely the positioning and dynamics of her left hand covering her sex—”her hand for a fig leaf”, “flexed in a sort of shameless contraction.” Its placement at the centre of the composition underscores its importance. As T. J. Clark has observed: Olympia‘s hand “has enraged and exalted critics as nothing else did.” Where Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus’s hand is languid, limp, unconscious, and Titian’s Venus of Urbino delicately, alluringly covers her sex, Olympia‘s hand is tense and confident, firmly protecting her sex, as if to emphasize her independence and sexual dominance over men.

Venus of Urbino, Titian, oil on canvas, 1538

Olympia does not bother to drape herself in a docile, inviting manner across her bed, does not look at the viewer with soft, suggestive eyes, does not smile coyly. She dares the viewer with her eyes, her posture dignified, her hand assertive. As Eunice Lipton describes succinctly: “This was a woman who could say ‘yes’, or she could say ‘no’.” This perhaps is Manet’s strongest merit in the legacy of Olympia—being able to be a male painter who can paint a female who is empowered to make her own decisions, and not merely be gazed upon passively—as well as the key to the beguilement of Olympia, and also a worthy lesson for modern day females—respect for oneself in one’s chosen profession, assured confidence, self-ownership, and the power inherent in saying ‘no’.