Venus & Olympia

The nude has a long history in Western art. Rampant in ancient Greek and Roman times, it resurfaced in the late fifteenth century. This is fairly surprising considering the restrictions of society at the time. Women's bodies especially were rigidly controlled by religious doctrine. Displaying an ounce more of flesh than was permitted could bring severe punishment. Sex and nudity might have flourished in the unregulated morass of folk tales and ballads. Paintings, though, were censored and often directly commissioned by the church. Priests could condemn a painting for the crime of depicting Biblical characters as real people. (As if believing that anyone in the Bible could actually exist). Yet look what they permitted. The bush, the willy, the whole full-frontal panorama which today would bring immediate banishment to the late-night schedules. There were rules, of course. The nude had to be young, pleasing to the eye. Most of all, she (and it was usually a she) had to be distant. Not contemporary, certainly not Biblical. The reappearance of the nude was part of the Renaissance and she was supposed to remain in the fantasy world of Greek and Roman legends.

The history of the nude is not entirely honerable. The best painters could make her an immediate and plausible figures, allowing the mythical settings to fade into irrelevance. The increasing perfection of the portraits and the meticulous attention to detail was linked to the Renaissance interest in biology. And there is a sensuousness in some works which empowers rather than degrades the subjects. Yet the nude is still invariably part of the old male creator-female formula, with all the corresponding power relations. Rather a lot of artists have taken advantage. A great many nude paintings – and the oeuvre of William Etty springs to mind here – are basically porn. Not always soft porn either. The arch façade of the nude has been used to excuse rape (those unfortunate Sabine women in many works), paedophilia (some of Balthus' dodgier moments) mutilation and snuff. At its crudest, the genre was a painter hiring a local prostitute to pose as Diana and boinking her in the studio afterwards.

Titian may have hired a prostitute too and may even have boinked her. Otherwise, though, his Venus of Urbino is unimpeachable. The mythological title is an irrelevance given to please the censors. This is simply a vivid study of a beautiful young woman. His Venus reclines on a couch, every part of her body a brilliant portrayal of comfort. Her legs cross easily, her heads leans back towards the pillow and her golden hair splays across her shoulders, offsetting her soft pink skin. In the background an older woman is watching a girl rummaging in a chest. An ordinary domestic scene, and its mundaneness emphasises the natural sense of Venus' pose. She has simply dressed as she chose and sees no reason to be embarrassed when we stare in.

Yet the eroticism of the painting can't be denied either. Make what you will of the expression on her placid face – the faintest of smiles, possibly a hint of an invitation? Regardless, our gaze is drawn towards her left hand. On the surface she is just discreetly covering up her private parts. Her fingers are curling inwards, however. Maybe, just maybe, the Venus is starting to masturbate herself. This hint, lying in almost the very centre of the painting, epitomises the whole feel of the work. It is a masterpiece of subtle sensuality; a celebration of a woman perfectly in control of her body, able to present it without humiliating either herself or the viewer. The next two nudes I came across as I flicked through my art books – Francois Boucher's Miss Louise O'Murphy, a courtesan presenting her fat arse for the taking, and Corregio's Jupiter and Io, a woman being raped by a cloud, for God's sake – confirmed how rare a truly erotic nude is.

Three centuries after Titian, the conventions for the nude were still intact. They were especially important to the conservative Royal Salon in France, to whom Manet submitted his Olympia. Olympia was, superficially at least, a deliberate copy of Venus of Urbino – a naked young woman reclining on a couch. But the details which Manet changed and his treatment of the subject make this a very different painting.

Olympia lies as stiffly as Titian's Venus is graceful. One hand clutches a dead bouquet of flowers. A black servant woman is presenting her with a fresh bunch. They give colour to what is almost a monochrome image but they are garish and rather unappealing. An unfriendly black cat arches its back at us; a perennial image of evil. The servant's race is also significant. In the nineteenth century black women were a symbol of, amongst other things, unchecked sexuality; witness the exaggerated buttocks of the Hottentot Venus. And no 'proper' lady at the time would have had a black woman as a personal servant. All the details build a horrible suspicion. This Olympia is not a goddess, she is not even a courtesan. Manet has not just used a prostitute as his model, he has made her his subject. She is a common hooker and the flowers are from her latest john.

And look how she has been painted. Her body is rather scrawny, her pose awkward, her skin pallid and unhealthy. Her eyes are empty and dead. None of the tricks used to portray the third dimension are employed here. She is flat and unnatural, barely more than a blob of paint. In fact, nothing at all has been done to give Olympia beauty, none of the schemes which normally wrap the nude with a spurious respectability. If her vacant expression says anything at all it is: “Tits! That's what you came for, isn't it? Well, here they are. Tits!” There they are, as erotic as a torn-out page of 'Jugs' magazine stuck to a wet pavement in January.

We find it hard now to understand the controversy which Olympia evoked, all the caricatures and criticisms and pure hatred. It wasn't because Olympia was a bare body. It was because she was nothing else. As Gilles Neret said in his excellent book, “Olympia was not a nude; she was naked.” Manet blatantly broke the rules for the nude. Worst than that, he was mocking them. In giving his prostitute the name of a goddess and the pose of a Old Master's beauty, he was implying that all nudes were nothing better than his. Simple porn, the product and satisfaction of male lust. If I was a member of the Royal Salon I would have been outraged too.

Nudes still exist in art today. Thankfully, they very rarely pose as nymphs or goddesses; and they don't have to be Beauty personified. Their bodies have been stretched, distorted, made almost demonic (most memorably in Picasso's Three Dancers). And other women other than the young and perfect are depicted. The most famous in recent years is Lucien Freud's Benefits Supervisor Sleeping, an overweight middle-aged woman presenting herself. The Impressionists dramatically widened the possibilities of art. Manet was their leader; and though Olympia is hardly an Impressionist painting, it has all the movement's daring and invention. With a single painting Manet overturned a centuries-old tradition. Flat, awkward Olympia became the future. For all her beauty, the Venus of Urbino belongs to a remote past.