A courtesan in painting is a woman who sold her company to rich men, and for centuries artists showed her under a disguise, usually as a goddess, until one painter dropped it. The picture that did it is Édouard Manet's Olympia, painted in 1863 and shown at the Paris Salon in 1865, where a naked woman on a bed looked straight at the viewer.
Manet did not invent the pose. He took it from Titian's Venus of Urbino, painted in 1538, and changed who the woman was: the goddess became a woman of the Paris demi monde, with a cat where Titian had a sleeping dog. Between those two pictures lies most of the story of how painters have looked at courtesans, and at the women themselves.
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The word courtesan is shakier than it sounds, because Titian's picture does not clearly show one. His patron, the duke of Urbino, called it only "the naked woman", and the room behind her holds a wedding chest.
Scholars still argue over whether she is Venus, a bride, a mistress or a courtesan, and the Uffizi, which owns her, describes a young bride about to be dressed for her wedding. That chest comes back below.
Manet's picture looks simpler, but its surprise lies in the model. The woman who lay on his couch for Olympia was Victorine Meurent, and viewers took her for exactly what the painting seemed to claim, a woman of the streets. They were wrong. She was a painter, and in 1876 the Salon hung her self-portrait in the same year it rejected Manet. That year comes back below too.
Was Titian's Venus of Urbino really a courtesan?
Nobody knows, and the evidence for the usual answer is thin…
What You'll Discover
Who the girl on the couch became.
What the cat at her feet means.
What a painter said about professional models.
What became of Olympia's model.