the public whose gaze met olympia's level stare,and the unblinking eyes of the cat, was astounded Never has a painting excited so much laughter,mockery or catcalls's one critic remarked.Daumier drew a bourgeois family gaping at it bewilderment (17.10).less able artists caricatured it at least 30 critics derided it in the press, complaining loudly of the seemingly brash and slap-dash way it was painted as well as of the embarassingly provocative and explicitly 'modern' subject .emile zola, a personal friend of manet and soon to become famous as a novelist of the seamier side of contemporary city life,answered them by concentrating on the picture's painterly qualities.'you wanted a nude , and you chose olympia,the first that came along he wrote luminous bright patches and you put in a bouquet of flowers.you wanted black patches and you placed a negress and a cat in the conner.what does it all mean? you hardly know and neither do i this was of course,disingenuous . zola must have recognized in the ally-cat,at least,a symbol of sexual promscuity.it was true,however,that in this painting manet was developing a new manner in pictorial representation,experimenting with tone,making strong contrast between related shades at either end of the scale and climinating the softenning intermediate range.That is one of the reasons why it made such an impact on young artist ,who recognized it as marking a break through.after manet's death they were to prevent its exportation to america by subscribing to buy it for the louvre it is easy enough to see why olympia offended the general public if it is compared with other female nudes exhibited in the same salon and bought by the french state for museums(17.11).In handing it could hardly be more unlike these daintily coloured and smoothly painted canvases. olympia's slender adolescent body is also in striking contrast to their voluptuous figures, which exemplify the accepted form of bourgeois femininity and sexuality. Full bosomed, narrow-waisted, wide hipped women populated one Salon after another and made a strong erotic appeal to men of the Second Empire whose wives were tightly corseted to give their bodies the same ample contours even when fully dressed. Women in pornographic photographs of the time are similarly fleshy and buxom. In paintings they were politely distanced in time and space, transformed into goddesses rising from the foam of southern seas or reposing in Arcadian glades. They display their bodies freely, though invariably without public hair, as undemanding objects of desire waiting for male embraces.