Scandal at the 1865 Salon. Édouard Manet shows a pale, naked girl lying indifferently on a divan. "What is this odalisque with a yellow belly, an ignoble model picked up God knows where, who represents Olympia? The crowd gathers as if at the morgue before M. Manet's overripe Olympia..." She is Victorine Meurent, one of the painter's favorite models. She posed for Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, for Woman with a Parrot, just as she would pose ten years later for The Railway. A peaceful body, yet a free and independent woman. The painting is a kind of homage to the traditional studio model who has haunted the desires of painters since the Renaissance. It is also a modernist provocation. The references, the mythological and classical allusions, are put to the service of a contemporary scene made all the more scandalous for its unmistakable evocation of the brothel.
