La nascita di Venere

At the Paris Salon of 1863 this was the picture everyone approved of. Cabanel showed his Venus drifting on a calm sea, eyes half-closed, and the emperor Napoleon the Third bought it on the spot for his own collection. That same year the young Cabanel was made a professor at the state art school, about as high as official success went. Two years later, at the same Salon, Manet hung a nude called Olympia who stared straight back at the viewer, and the public was scandalised. The two pictures are usually told together now, the safe goddess and the modern woman, though at the time only one of them caused trouble. Émile Zola, no friend of this kind of painting, sneered that Cabanel's goddess looked as though she were made of pink and white marzipan. She floats on a foam of loosely painted cloud, with small cupids circling above her.