Olympia

A Venus for modern Paris

Édouard Manet painted Olympia in 1863, the same year as Luncheon on the Grass, but he waited two years before exhibiting it. When it was hung at the Salon of 1865, crowds gathered in outrage, and guards had to protect it from visitors who wanted to strike it with umbrellas. It was moved high on the wall, out of reach.

The painting's composition comes directly from Titian's Venus of Urbino of 1538, which Manet had copied in Florence: a reclining nude on a bed, a maid in the background, an animal at her feet. But Manet turned the Renaissance goddess into a contemporary Parisian woman, and that was the scandal.

The face and the gaze

The model is Victorine Meurent, who also posed for Luncheon on the Grass. She looks directly and coolly at the viewer, with neither shyness nor seduction. Her name, Olympia, was commonly used by courtesans in Paris at the time, and many visitors understood the painting as a portrait of a high-class prostitute receiving a client, represented by the viewer.

Detail 1Zoom to detail

The maid and the bouquet

Behind the bed, a Black maid in a pink dress brings a large bouquet of flowers wrapped in paper, presumably a gift from an admirer. The model was Laure, a woman who lived in Paris and posed for Manet several times. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to her role: she is not a decorative accessory but a modern working woman of Paris, painted with care and individuality.

Detail 2Zoom to detail

The black cat

At the foot of the bed, where Titian painted a sleeping dog, symbol of fidelity, Manet painted a black cat with its back arched and tail raised. The cat was traditionally associated with sensuality and independence, and its presence was read as a provocative joke. Caricaturists of the time loved to exaggerate it.

Detail 3Zoom to detail

The slipper

One satin slipper is still on Olympia's foot; the other has fallen. The detail is tiny but revealing: a sign of intimacy and of a moment interrupted. It also emphasises that she is not a timeless goddess but a woman in a real room.

Detail 4Zoom to detail

A new way of painting

Critics also attacked the technique. Manet painted the body with flat, pale tones and strong outlines, with little of the soft modelling that academic painters used to make flesh look rounded. To his contemporaries this looked crude and unfinished; to later artists it was a revolution. The flatness of the image and its frank modernity opened the way to Impressionism and modern art.

Seeing Olympia

Olympia measures about 1.3 by 1.9 metres. After Manet's death, Claude Monet organised a subscription to buy it for the French state in 1890. It entered the Louvre in 1907 and is now in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris.