Flaccid Venus

Audiences were shocked when Édouard Manet’s painting Olympia, which depicted a nude female figure, made its public debut in 1865 at the Salon du Louvre.

Alexandre Cabanel’s The Birth of Venus (fig. 1) is a perfect example of Neoclassicism, an artistic movement that drew its inspiration from the artistry and culture of ancient Greece and Rome. For his painting’s subject matter, Cabanel turned to mythology, specifically the story of Venus’s birth. Throughout the Renaissance and well into the nineteenth century, this particular theme afforded visual artists the ability to portray female nudity and eroticism without running afoul of public morality.

Think of Sandro Botticelli’s The birth of Venus (fig. 2). Here, an otherworldly beauty surfs on top of a seashell and is literally blown to shore. At once aloof and alluring, her thoughts are preoccupied elsewhere, and yet, she still manages to cover her privates with her long, golden tresses. Or consider the love goddess as depicted in Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (fig. 3). So beautiful, but so bored by the countryside that surrounds her, she appears to have drifted off to sleep while masturbating. These are female nudes as traditionally painted by early modern and late modern artists, cloaked in mythology and outfitted in pure beauty alone.

Paintings like these were also in keeping with the tastes and preferences of visitors to the Salon du Louvre, the official art exhibition of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, where Cabanel displayed his Venus in 1863. The Salon itself considered artistic aesthetic as self-evident, defined by the artistry and stylings of the Renaissance, and as timeless as, say, an ancient Greek goddess. Consequently, most of the work displayed during the Salon’s annual showcase was formulaic, expected, and, consequently, quite boring. Still, the Salon could make or break an artist’s reputation. 

Indeed, the goddess on Cabanel’s canvas doesn’t inhabit the real world. Here, we have a woman who is beauty idealized. Fully nude, she is supported by a bed of waves, which, in their frozen solidity, appear to suspend her at sea, rather than transport her ashore. Putti hang in the air above her, flitting and fluttering about, chubby and chub-less. 

And what, pray tell, is Venus doing? She reclines and lazily rests the back of a hand against her forehead, her dainty fingers curved upward. Her back is arched. Her hips are turned directly toward us. Her right thigh presses against her left one to cover her unshielded genitalia, but, even then, just barely. Her pose is both languid and coy, as if she is just waking up from a nap, caught in the midst of an exquisite stretch that’s been arrested at the peak of imminent exposure. She’s serene, sensuous, a bit sassy. Her pink lips smile slyly, while her gaze never meets our own. She looks up at the putti, instead, as if she is unaware of our lascivious stares.

Because Venus doesn’t look directly at us, we can comfortably look at her—and the stunning spectacle of her bare flesh, unencumbered by modesty, demands that we do so. Cabanel paints his goddess with the attention to detail of a lover obsessed. Not even a single stroke of his brush is present to distract our attention from his perfect illusion. Instead, his seemingly effortless blending and shading strike a primal chord in our sexual unconscious. We can easily imagine the feel of the pliant, plump flesh that swells round and below Venus’s navel, around her thighs and upper arms, and beneath her breasts. Her hips are wide, like those of a woman who has given birth, and yet, her pubic area is hairless, prepubescent. She has the breasts of a virgin, untouched by children or time. Her nipples are swollen and pink. It’s as if she is both physically tangible and sexually attainable: a painting that is also a fetish. If we stare at her long enough, desire her strongly enough... Emperor Napoleon III himself, satisfied with Cabanel’s depiction of Venus, acquired the painting for his own private collection. (One can only speculate how Empress Eugénie may have considered her husband’s purchase.) 

But not everyone who attended the 1863 Salon exhibition admired Cabanel’s Venus. In his critique of the painting, Émile Zola sarcastically remarked: “The goddess, drowned in a sea of milk, resembles a delicious courtesan, but not of flesh and blood—that would be indecent—but made of a sort of pink and white marzipan.”

Zola did not mince his words when it came to the inherent hypocrisy of Cabanel’s subject matter. The art critic longed for the artists of his day to look away from the artificial and the contrived, and to find inspiration and beauty in modern life experience, instead. The painter Édouard Manet rose to meet Zola’s challenge. Whereas Salon attendees were busy ogling Cabanel’s Venus in 1863, during the 1865 exhibition, two years later, they were scandalized by Manet’s Olympia (fig. 4).

Manet based his Olympia on Titian’s Venus of Urbino (fig. 5), yet another Renaissance painting of a reclining, flaccid nude goddess. Whether Manet did this in order to demonstrate that modern works of art could still reference the past or to shield himself from critics by copying an admired and classic composition is a matter of debate (and one I won’t attempt to answer here). What is unquestionable is that Manet’s Olympia made both a bold statement about and a significant break from the then dominant artistic conventions of subject matter and technique.

On Manet’s canvas, a nude woman also reclines—but she’s no Venus. Instead, she is Olympia, a common and modern Parisian prostitute. Olympia is not a perfect beauty in the classic, idealized sense, either. Her left eye is larger than her right eye. Her body is thin. Is that hair in her armpit? She’s also not coy in the least. This is a woman who, no doubt, has racked up her share of life experience, supporting herself through sex work. Neither is she oblivious to our gaze. Instead, Olympia defiantly stares back at us. We may even feel uncomfortable looking at and examining her as she continues to confront us directly.

The reaction of the black cat on the edge of Olympia’s bed—arching its back, fluffing its tail, possibly hissing—confirms that we have entered the scene uninvited. Is Olympia displeased, upset, or angered by our intrusion? Her maid tries to discern how Olympia will react. Will Olympia wave us away, or will she jump up from her bed to deliver a slap? Olympia blocks our visual access to her genitalia with her left hand, too. Unless we’re willing to open our wallets, there will be no dessert tonight. At any rate, here is a woman who is neither bored nor aloof. Instead, Olympia is engaged, and, consequently, she engages us.

Besides, let’s talk about the stylings of the painting itself. In contrast to Cabanel, Manet makes no attempt to pretend that his painting isn’t, uh, painted. Instead, he calls our attention to the fact that Olympia and her surroundings are only an illusion. The imagery is mostly flat, practically two-dimensional in some areas of the painting, including the main figure’s torso and toes, and the folds of the fabric. Manet’s brush strokes are also apparent, his coloured oils swiped onto and across the canvas, overlapping and layered. However, we can’t easily divorce Manet’s technique from his painting’s subject matter. In being so brazen about the materials and methods he employs on his canvas, Manet also demands that we be honest and unabashed about the topic he depicts. He not only strips away the clothing of the main figure, he strips away the mythology and all of its idealistic pretence from the female nude, as well.

Today, we might consider Manet’s painting somewhat mundane, even tame, perhaps, what with our streaming digital porn and explicit sexts of seemingly sentient phalluses. For the Parisian art community in 1865, however, Olympia was absolutely revolutionary. Manet’s honest depiction of a contemporary woman, warts and all, helped  redefine what visual art—not to mention, beauty itself—could mean for the modern world.

'Flaccid Venus' © 2018 Leith St. John