At the Paris Salon of 1865, administrators set up a barrier and posted guards to keep the crowd from tearing a canvas to pieces. The painting was Edouard Manet's Olympia, a nude woman on a bed, painted in 1863 on a canvas nearly six feet wide, a scale the Academy reserved for history and religious epics. This deep dive explains why the public reacted with such fury, contrasting Olympia with Alexandre Cabanel's idealized Birth of Venus from the same year and walking through how Manet deliberately rewrote Titian's Venus of Urbino symbol by symbol: a black cat in place of the loyal dog, cut flowers instead of a myrtle bush, and a hand clamped down rather than softly curled.

The episode then turns to the real women in the studio. Victorine Meurent, the 19-year-old model for Olympia, went on to exhibit her own paintings at the Salon, while Laure ...