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.

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.