올랭피아

When Manet showed this in Paris in 1865 it caused a scandal that guards had to be posted to protect it. Everyone knew the pose, a reclining nude was a centuries-old subject, borrowed here almost directly from a famous Venus by Titian. But Manet stripped away every excuse for it. This is not a goddess. She is a Parisian courtesan, named Olympia, a name associated at the time with women who sold sex, and she looks out at the viewer with cool, unembarrassed directness, her hand pressed firmly over herself. A servant brings flowers from a client she has not bothered to acknowledge. Even the black cat at her feet, bristling, read as vulgar. What shocked people was not nakedness, which the Salon hung every year, but that she looked back at them as an equal.