Between 1793 and 1867 five French and Spanish paintings changed what political subject matter could look like in Western canvas painting. The five — David's Death of Marat, Goya's Third of May 1808, Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, Courbet's Stone Breakers, and Manet's Execution of Maximilian — together form the load-bearing seventy-four-year sequence in which Western political painting moved from Neoclassical allegory to documentary Realism.

Titian painted the Venus of Urbino in 1538 in Venice on commission from Guidobaldo II della Rovere, the 24-year-old heir to the Duchy of Urbino, almost certainly as a wedding gift for his 10-year-old bride Giulia Varano. The 119 × 165 centimetre oil-on-canvas shows a naked young woman lying on a red velvet daybed inside a Renaissance bedroom, looking directly out of the picture at the viewer with calm self-possession.

Édouard Manet finished A Bar at the Folies-Bergère in March 1882 in his Paris studio, six months before his fifty-first birthday and twelve months before his death. The painting shows a young barmaid standing behind a marble counter in a Paris cabaret, with the entire scene behind her reflected in a mirror that occupies almost the full width of the canvas. The mirror does not show what it should. The geometry is wrong on purpose.

They are not the same painter. Édouard Manet (1832-1883) and Claude Monet (1840-1926) met at the Paris Salon of 1865 by accident — Manet had walked in furious to find his Olympia hung beside a seascape signed "Monet" that he had not painted. Eighteen years later Monet would be a pallbearer at Manet's funeral. A reading of the eight years of friendship between them, the painting they each gave the other, and why their names are confused to this day.

In short: Between 1862 and 1897, a group of French painters made the anonymous city crowd their main subject. Edouard Manet filled a Paris park with a fashionable throng, Gustave Caillebotte set a couple among strangers on a rainy boulevard, and Camille Pissarro looked down from a high window at a river of traffic and walkers. None of these pictures tells a story. Each one treats the modern crowd itself, the ordinary public going about an afternoon, as worthy of a large and s

The 1865 Paris Salon hung Manet's Olympia high enough that visitors had to look up to see it, and they did, in numbers large enough to require a guard. The painting was not scandalous because it showed a nude — half the Salon showed nudes. It was scandalous because of a specific set of decisions Manet had made about how the nude was painted, who she was, and what she was looking at. The mechanism, step by step.

Before Goya, European painters showed war as triumph. After Goya, they could no longer pretend. The Third of May 1808 ended the heroic battle picture and invented the painting of senseless violence — a tradition that runs through Manet, Picasso, and every photograph of war we have made since.

A young woman lies naked on a white bed staring directly at the viewer. Her maid brings flowers from a client. Her cat arches its back at the foot of the bed. Manet painted Olympia in 1863, exhibited her in 1865, and the Salon riot that followed ended one century of European painting and began another.