Édouard Manet, Olympia

 

Édouard Manet, Olympia, oil on canvas, 1963-65, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

When Olympia appeared at the Paris Salon of 1865, scandal erupted. Viewers were accustomed to seeing the female nude through a veil of myth, as Venus or Danaë for example, an “acceptable” nudity cloaked in unattainability and elevated to a higher order that made it safe for contemplation. In a way, Manet stripped away that veil. His reclining figure was not divine, but modern: a Parisian sex worker confronting her audience with agency and self-possession. The result was shocking, proof that art is only ever scandalous within the culture that produces it, because it exposes its unspoken boundaries.

At first glance, the painting can appear straightforward, a nude white woman reclines on a bed, attended to by a Black maid holding a large bouquet of flowers. Yet Olympia’s unflinching gaze shattered convention. Modelled by Victorine Meurent, she meets the viewer’s eye without shame, a gesture that critics of the time called “depraved” and “grotesque”. What unsettled them was not her nudity, but her agency. Olympia is being looked at, but she is also looking back, collapsing the passive fantasy traditionally afforded to male spectators.

Manet’s reference to Titian’s Venus of Urbino made the affront sharper still. Where Titian’s goddess exudes sensual passivity, Manet’s woman radiates defiance. Even her pale, unidealised skin and the thin outline of her body reject the soft chiaroscuro of academic convention. Light here doesn’t caress, it exposes. The harsh lighting exposes Olympia in her nakedness. Even small changes carry weight: Titian’s faithful dog becomes a black cat, a symbol of erotic promiscuity, while the name “Olympia,” commonly associated with prostitutes in 1860s Paris, further scandalised viewers.

Scholars have since turned to the painting’s racial dynamics to uncover deeper layers of tension. It has been argued that Manet’s inclusion of Laure, the Black maid, was not purely a matter of artistic convention but part of a visual binary between Black and white, purity and impurity, subject and object. In this reading, Laure’s presence “inevitably reformulates the Cartesian perspectival logic that allows whiteness to function as the only subject of consideration.” When juxtaposed with Olympia’s pale body, the maid becomes the racialised “other,” embodying the stereotypes that sustained Western hierarchies of vision and desire, created only 15 years after slavery was abolished in France.

Today, Olympia hangs in the Musée d’Orsay as a cornerstone of modern art, a reminder that artistic revolution often begins with discomfort. Manet didn’t scandalise Paris because he painted a naked woman; he scandalised Paris because he painted her truthfully, and in doing so, forced society to confront who gets to look, and who gets to be seen.