Manets Olympia

Then as now, she violates the artifice of art with no illusions. Her stare is without pretensions, has lost nothing of its brazen shamelessness. A sluttish odor still lingers on her naked flesh despite Manet’s attempt to place her in that comfortable tradition of Giorgione*. She is too real, too much the woman adolescent boys quip about among themselves and whose lusts burn to know. Unlike the artful beauties of the past, in cold dead marble stone, she is awake, fully competent in the wiles of her fallen flesh – to be touched and not simply looked at or admired least of all at a distance. Like an old Paris back street lamp, she still burns without a flicker. *An illusion to Venetian painter Giorgione’s (1477? - 1510) Sleeping Venus.