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.