Venus Of Urbino Essay

As the art world moved away from Renaissance ideals, the way women were shown in the art world began to shift. In 1863, the french painter Edouard Manet used Venus of Urbino as inspiration for his radical painting Olympia, in which he challenged the limited way women were depicted in art. For one thing, he paints a prostitute, rather than an aristocrat. He paints a prostitute who is unashamed of her work, and unwilling to conform to classically idealized form. Even more radical however, is the way he painted her. Olympia meets the viewer’s gaze head on, and stares almost defiantely. She is positioned slightly above the viewer, and gazes down powerfully. She is wearing just enough to not be considered a nude figure. Instead she is a naked one,

in that she is fully aware of her body. The fact that she is wearing anything - in this case just slippers, a silk ribbon around her neck, and a bracelet - adds to the idea that she is naked because she wants to be, not nude for the purpose of male pleasure.

She is not posing for a man, or serving as a sexual object. Instead, she is defiantly unashamed of her sexuality. Her hand, rather than delicately and purposefully placed across her lap as it is in the Venus of Urbino, is taut and strong, signifying that she is in control. It is a barrier, rather than an invitation. A black maid is presenting Olympia with flowers from one of her clients, and a cat at the end of the bed arches its back rebelliously (Gardner’s Art Through the Ages). Olympia essentially defies most of John Berger’s philosophies, including the idea of a woman’s statues being valid only in relation to a man. In his theories around surveillance of women, Berger claims that “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight”

(Berger). Olympia is a rare image of a female figure not reduced to a body. Many nude or naked women in art were painted as models openly displaying themselves, whether aware or unaware of the viewer. In this way, men are relieved of the guilt of sexual or male gratification, while the shame and blame of being nude and erotic is shifted onto the women, despite the fact that these images were produced by men for male pleasure. An image of a woman trying to conceal herself, or attempting to hide her body would result in the blame being on the male viewer. In such a case, he would be the violator, infringing on her privacy, the one forcing her to feel the need to hide herself (Nwafor).