Olympia

Painted in 1863-1865 and now at the Musée d'Orsay, Olympia is the most important painting of 19th-century France and the direct precursor to modern art's revolution. When exhibited at the Salon of 1865 it provoked outrage that dwarfed even the response to Luncheon on the Grass: the nude reclines on her divan with the composed directness of a professional, her gaze confronting the viewer without submission or invitation. The visual quotation of Titian's Venus of Urbino is deliberate and subversive — the traditional allegorical Venus replaced by a contemporary woman in a recognisably professional context.

Manet builds the nude figure with pale, relatively flat flesh tones that deliberately refuse the warm academic idealisation of the nude tradition. The body is described through large areas of warm beige-white, the shadows minimal and cool rather than warm. The white bed linens are differentiated from the flesh through subtle tonal and colour variation. The surrounding objects — the black cat, the maid's dark dress, the flowers — create a complex chromatic context for the central pale figure.