Olympia caused a scandal at the Paris Salon of 1865 because Manet painted a nude who looked like a courtesan of his own day, laid her out like one of the old masters' Venuses, and had her stare straight back at the visitors. The crowds were so hostile that the picture was moved above a door, out of reach, and guards were posted beside it.
Manet signed the canvas in 1863 and kept it for two years before sending it to the Salon, on the advice of his friend the poet Zacharie Astruc. Within days the abuse was pouring in.
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The nudity is the reason usually given, yet the reviewers of 1865 hardly wrote about it. They wrote about dirt. Théophile Gautier found that the tone of the flesh was dirty.
Jules Claretie sneered that no one could accuse Manet of idealizing foolish virgins, since he made them dirty ones. Francis Aubert, in Le Pays on 15 May, called her neither true nor living nor beautiful, and Félix Deriège, in Le Siècle on 2 June, said she did not have a human form.
Art historians who counted found more than seventy reviews, and only two were not openly hostile. Not one put the picture in any context. A critic named Bonnin wrote in La France on 7 June that he preferred to think Manet had simply made a mistake.
Manet, writing to his friend Baudelaire shortly after the Salon opened, said that abuses were raining on him like hail, and he wondered whether somebody was wrong.
So what was the crowd reacting to? The picture answers better than the reviews do, and it starts with a debt that every educated visitor should have recognized.
What did Manet borrow for Olympia?
The pose, mostly. The Musée d'Orsay names three ancestors for the woman on the bed: Titian's Venus of Urbino, Goya's Maja desnuda and the odalisques of Ingres. Its notice adds that Manet moved all of them into a contemporary subject. Titian had painted a goddess on a bed in a palace. Manet kept the reclining body and the bed and took the myth away.
What replaced the myth was a set of things a visitor could read at a glance. The Orsay lists a flower, a piece of jewelry, a shawl, a slipper, a curtain, a bouquet and a Black servant. It was a room in modern Paris, and a visitor who had come for a goddess found a woman of the day. Claretie, in L'Artiste that May, called her a courtesan, no doubt.
That may be where the word dirty came from. Beside a smooth, golden goddess, a flat and pale body was easy to call unwashed, and the Orsay records the insult that stuck: critics dismissed her as "that odalisque with the yellow belly."
What You'll Discover
Why a black cat mattered.
What the catalogue said about her.
Who stands behind her.
How the scandal ended.