“This Olympia is a sort of female gorilla, a grotesque in India rubber outlined in black, apes on a bed, in a state of complete nudity, the horizontal attitude of Titian’s Venus: the right arm rests on the body in the same fashion, except for the hand, which is flexed in a sort of shameless contraction.”
Titian, Venus of Urbino, Oil on Canvas, Uffizi, Florence, 1538.
Olympia, the Venus of Paris, 1863…
Amedee Cantaloube writes in Le Grand Journal, 1865:
“This Olympia is a sort of female gorilla, a grotesque in India rubber outlined in black, apes on a bed, in a state of complete nudity, the horizontal attitude of Titian’s Venus: the right arm rests on the body in the same fashion, except for the hand, which is flexed in a sort of shameless contraction.”
Titian, Venus of Urbino, Oil on Canvas, Uffizi, Florence, 1538.
Olympia, the Venus of Paris, 1863…
This is a blog set in 1865 during the great Paris Salon where Edouard Manet’s painting Olympia was causing an uproar. The Public Reaction The violent and intense reaction by the Parisian critics and public was overwhelming – the reaction so great that the cornucopia of criticisms and insults rained ... Continue reading
Blogging Manet's Olympia in 1865 