Picture the scene. Paris, May 1865. The official Salon, sacred temple of French art, has just opened its doors at the Palais des Champs-Élysées. Thousands of visitors surge forward, eager to discover the new canvases that will make or break reputations. Among them, a work modest in appearance: a nak
By Artedusa
••8 min read
The day Paris vomited on Olympia
Picture the scene. Paris, May 1865. The official Salon, sacred temple of French art, has just opened its doors at the Palais des Champs-Élysées. Thousands of visitors surge forward, eager to discover the new canvases that will make or break reputations. Among them, a work modest in appearance: a naked woman, stretched out on a bed, her gaze fixed, almost provocative. Around her, scandal erupts like a bomb. Shouts ring out, insults rain down, some visitors brandish their canes, ready to slash the canvas. One critic writes that it is "a kind of female gorilla, modeled in white gelatin." Another calls it "a courtesan with dirty contours." Even the Salon guards must protect the work from spittle and punches. Manet, the author of this cursed painting, is devastated. Yet Olympia is neither the first nor the last work to shock. So why did this one, more than any other, turn a simple exhibition into a riot?
The Venus who was not one
To understand the outrage, one must first grasp what the female nude represented in 1865. For centuries, Western painting had codified the female body according to strict rules. A goddess, a nymph, an allegory—it mattered little, as long as the nudity was justified by myth or religion. Titian’s Venus of Urbino, painted in 1538, was the archetype: an idealized beauty, languid on silk sheets, her gaze demurely lowered, her fingers brushing her sex with calculated grace. Her body was smooth, flawless, bathed in a golden light that made her seem almost divine. Nineteenth-century viewers knew this painting by heart. It embodied the very idea of the acceptable nude: a distant fantasy, untouchable, timeless.
Then came Olympia. No myth here, no pretext. Just a woman, naked, looking you straight in the eye. Her body is not that of a goddess, but that of a Parisian woman in 1865—pale, almost wan, with narrow hips and small breasts, far from the generous curves of Venus. Her left hand does not caress her sex languidly; it covers it, as if to say: "This is mine. Not yours." The drapery beneath her is not a cloud of silk, but a simple mattress, rumpled, almost sordid. And that harsh light, without shadow or mystery, illuminating every detail without mercy... As if Manet had deliberately stripped away all the veils of idealization to show flesh in its rawest truth.
The gaze that kills
What shocks the most, perhaps, is that gaze. In the pictorial tradition, female nudes carefully avoided meeting the viewer’s eyes. Titian’s Venus lowers her gaze, Ingres’ Grande Odalisque turns her head, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus offers us her profile. These women are objects of contemplation, not subjects who contemplate in return. They exist to be admired, desired, possessed by the male gaze—but never to challenge it.
Olympia, however, stares at you. Without a smile, without modesty, without invitation. Her gaze is that of a woman who knows exactly what you are thinking, and who couldn’t care less. Worse: who judges you. This is not the gaze of a muse, but that of a professional. A courtesan. And in the Paris of the Second Empire, where prostitution is both omnipresent and carefully hidden, this gaze is an insult. It reminds the well-to-do bourgeois that their most secret fantasies come at a price, and that this price is negotiated in the brothels of the Opéra district.
Manet does not merely paint a prostitute. He places her at the center of the Salon, before the eyes of the Parisian elite, and gives her the power to look back at you. It is an unbearable role reversal. As if, suddenly, the roles were reversed: it is no longer the artist who exposes the woman, but the woman who exposes you.
The Black maid and the bouquet of flowers: symbols that bleed
Behind Olympia, a Black maid holds out a bouquet of flowers. This detail, seemingly innocuous, is a ticking time bomb. In traditional iconography, Black servants were often used as exotic accessories, mere foils for white beauties. But here, the maid is not a prop. She is present, and her gaze seems to say: "You see what’s happening? So do I." Her presence reminds us that Olympia’s world is not that of the gods, but that of transactions, inequalities, power dynamics.
As for the bouquet, it has nothing romantic about it. These flowers, likely sent by a client, are a symbol of merchandise. They say: "You are paid. You are for sale." In classical painting, flowers were often associated with purity, with the fragility of beauty. Here, they become a cynical reminder of reality: beauty is a commodity, and Olympia is living proof of it.
Manet pushes realism to the unbearable. He does not merely show a courtesan—he shows the system that surrounds her. The maid, the flowers, the black cat arching at her feet (a symbol of lechery, but also of bad omens)... Everything contributes to creating a scene that is not only provocative, but political. Olympia is not just a woman; she is a mirror held up to bourgeois society, and this mirror reflects a truth too ugly to bear.
The technique that defies the rules
If Olympia’s subject is revolutionary, so is its execution. Manet did not only choose to paint a prostitute—he painted her in a way that defied all academic conventions. At the time, painters were trained at the École des Beaux-Arts, where they learned to model bodies with subtle shadows, to blend colors in harmonious gradients, to create the illusion of depth. Manet, however, seems to have deliberately broken every rule.
Look at Olympia’s contours: they are sharp, almost harsh, as if cut with a knife. No sfumato here, no soft transitions that give classical nudes their dreamlike quality. The light is flat, almost crude, without the play of shadow and light that usually sculpts bodies. The colors are applied in flat areas, without modeling, as if Manet had painted with scissors rather than a brush. Even the background is treated summarily, almost carelessly, as if the artist wanted to say: "What matters is her. The rest is unimportant."
This technique, which seems almost banal today, was heresy at the time. Critics saw it as clumsiness, laziness, an insult to their refined sensibilities. "It looks like a playing card!" exclaimed one. "A child’s drawing!" added another. In reality, Manet had studied the old masters—Velázquez, Goya, Japanese prints—and had drawn a radical lesson from them: painting does not have to imitate reality; it must recompose it. By flattening volumes, simplifying forms, he created an image that was no longer an open window onto an ideal world, but an autonomous surface, an object in itself.
It was a revolution. And like all revolutions, it was first met with cries of anger.
The black cat and the end of illusions
In the lower right corner of Olympia, a black cat arches its back, tail raised. In traditional iconography, cats were often associated with femininity, sensuality, even witchcraft. But this cat is not cute. It seems ready to pounce, to scratch, to defend its mistress from prying eyes. Its black fur absorbs the light, like a hole in the canvas, a reminder that this scene is not a dream, but a reality—and that this reality has claws.
This cat is also an ironic nod to the Venus of Urbino. In Titian’s painting, a small dog sleeps peacefully at the goddess’s feet, a symbol of fidelity and gentleness. In Manet’s, the dog is replaced by a cat, an independent, unpredictable animal that submits to no one. It is a perfect metaphor for Olympia’s attitude: she is not there to please, to submit, to play the game of seduction. She is simply there, and if you don’t like what you see, that is your problem.
This black cat is also the symbol of the end of illusions. In 1865, Paris was in the midst of transformation. Haussmann was carving out grand boulevards, café-concerts were flourishing, prostitution was exploding. The city was becoming the capital of pleasure, but also of hypocrisy. The bourgeois who were outraged by Olympia were the same ones who frequented brothels by night. Manet, however, does not judge. He shows. And what he shows is a society that prefers comfortable lies to disturbing truths.
The legacy of a cursed canvas
Today, Olympia reigns in the Musée d’Orsay, surrounded by visitors who contemplate her with a curiosity tinged with respect. She has become an icon, a symbol of modernity, a work studied in art schools around the world. Yet it is difficult to imagine the scale of the scandal she provoked in her time. It was not just a painting that shocked—it was a work that changed the course of art history.
After Olympia, nothing would ever be the same. The Impressionists, then the Fauves, the Cubists, the Surrealists... All, in one way or another, owed her something. She paved the way for a painting that no longer sought to idealize, but to show. To show reality in all its complexity, its ugliness, its beauty. She proved that a work of art could be both a mirror and a weapon.
And if you look closely at Olympia today, you will see that her gaze has lost none of its power. She still stares at you, with that same expression, both indifferent and provocative. As if she knows that, more than a century and a half later, she still has the power to unsettle you. As if she were saying: "So, still so sure you want to look at me?"
