Olympia

A woman reclines on a bed. She is nude. She wears a single orchid in her hair, a black ribbon around her neck, a bracelet, and a mule slipper on one foot. She looks at you. A Black servant stands behind her, presenting a large bouquet of flowers wrapped in paper. A black cat stands at the foot of the bed, tail raised. The woman's hand rests on her thigh.

The pentimento here is not hidden beneath the paint. It is structural. The painting quotes Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538) almost directly: the same reclining pose, the same proportions, the same compositional rhythm. Titian's Venus is a goddess. She gazes with serene unavailability. Manet takes every element of that image and drains it of its mythological excuse.

What he painted beneath the surface of the convention was the reality the convention was always covering. The flowers are a gift from a paying client. The servant presents them. The transaction is visible. Olympia was a common name for sex workers in 1860s Paris. Every viewer in 1865 understood what they were looking at. What they could not tolerate was being made to be the client.

"She knows she is being looked at. That knowledge, returned directly through her eyes, was what Paris could not forgive."

The model was Victorine Meurent, Manet's favourite model. She was not a passive subject. She was a painter herself, exhibiting at the Salon in the same years she posed for Manet. She outlived him by decades. The woman who sat for the most scandalous painting in the history of the Paris Salon was, in her own life, an artist.

When Olympia was exhibited in 1865, the response was immediate and physical. Critics called it obscene, a gorilla, a playing card. Crowds gathered to jeer. The painting had to be rehung high up, near the ceiling, so viewers could not reach it with their umbrellas. Guards were posted. The Salon kept it on display, which is itself remarkable. They could have removed it.

• Her hand is not modest. The placement of her hand on her thigh is often described as the figure covering herself. It is not. The hand is placed there with the same direct intent as her gaze. It is a deliberate refusal of the nude's traditional pose of passive availability.
• The black ribbon is the only clothing. She has removed everything except this one item. The ribbon around her neck was a common marker in 1860s Paris depictions of sex workers. Its presence here is not decorative. It is a code, and Manet's contemporary audience read it immediately.
• The black cat at the foot of the bed. In Titian's Venus of Urbino, a small dog sleeps in the same position: a symbol of fidelity and domesticity. Manet replaced it with a black cat, arched and alert. In French, the word for cat carries the same double meaning it does in English. Manet made this substitution on purpose.