Olympia

Olympia. Édouard Manet. 1863 C. E. Oil on canvas.


  • Female nude; erotic, sensual
  • Female nudes clothed by mythology or sheer beauty; Manet draws on ancient Greek traditions of modesty; does something radically modern
  • Model for Monet was Titian’s Venus de Urbino; strips away that veil of mythology; great art based upon the Renaissance, Manet challenged this. 
  • Model isn’t a venus; resembles a real woman in a real apartment in Paris; her features aren’t idealised, like the Venus’s. 
  • Asymmetrical lips, lips too thin. 
  • Other nudes depicted Venus in a coy way; she’s looking directly at us. She’s sentient and confronting us. 
  • This woman is likely a prostitute based on her name, Olympia. 
  • Olympia’s servant handing her flowers from her patrons/customers; we, the viewer, must have entered abruptly, disturbing/frightening the cat.
  •  Higher class prostitute, not lower. 
  • Manet outlined her in black, barely any shadows or depth. One would expect modeling of the female nude on the breasts/abdomen. 
  • Manet’s Olympia is flat; shadowed in unexpected areas. Her hands are shaded instead.
  • Angularity of the body. Manet is inventing what beauty could be in the modern world. 


  • Its debut only served to bewilder and scandalize the Parisian public. 
  • Olympia features a nude woman reclining upon a chaise lounge, with a small black cat at her feet and a black female servant behind her brandishing a bouquet of flowers. 
  • Considered a great insult to the academic tradition; Nineteenth-century French salon painting was supposed to perpetually return to the classical past to retrieve and reinvent its forms and ideals, making them relevant for the present moment. 
  • In using a contemporary subject (and not Venus), Manet mocked that tradition and, moreover, dared to suggest that the classical past held no relevance. He stripped the Venus of Urbino of its meaning. 
  • In place of the seamlessly contoured voluptuous figure of Venus, set within a richly atmospheric and imaginary world, Olympia was flatly painted, poorly contoured, lacked depth and was set in the contemporary world of prostitution. 
  • The figure was flat and washed out, the background dark; te artist abandoned centuries-old practice. The artist had dissolved classical illusionism. 
  • Manet had created an artistic revolution: a contemporary subject depicted in a modern manner. The painting’s inclusion of a black woman tapped into the French colonialist mindset while providing a stark contrast for the whiteness of Olympia. 
  • Olympia occupies a pivotal moment in art history. Situated on the threshold of the shift from the classical tradition to an industrialised modernity, it is a perfect metaphor of an irretrievably disappearing past and an as yet unknowable future. 
  • Ignores past ideals; pathway to the future of art history. 
  • Manet is often referred to as the father of Impressionism. Manet also drew inspiration from Spanish artists such as Velasquez and Goya, as well as 17th century Dutch painters like Frans Hals. 
  • Stark contrast of colors; simplified modeling, active brushwork
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