Olympia
Édouard Manet
(1832 - 1883)
Many authorities consider Olympia one of the major forerunners of modern art.
In 1862 Manet took Venus out of mythology and made her a 19th century Parisian: a demimonde, a kept woman. From this point on, other artists recorded the people and places they knew best in their daily lives. It is not commonly known, however, that Manet first built highly detailed scale model sets to work out problems of composition, lighting and other graphic elements before putting brush and paint to canvas. This is a recently discovered photograph of Manet's model set for the Olympia painting. None of the actual model sets he created for this and other paintings survive. Olympia now resides in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris.
