The canvas is associated with the beginning of the birth of impressionism. It was first presented to the public in the Paris Salon in 1865 and caused a major scandal. The fact is that the name of the painting was not at all connected with the notorious Mount Olympus, this name was associated with women of easy virtue among the contemporaries of Manet. Unfortunately, little is known about painting. Most likely, the artist was inspired by the work of Alexander Cabanel “The Birth of Venus”, exhibited in the same place two years earlier and had a sensational success. Obviously, Mane was attracted by this topic, and, wanting to achieve recognition, he wrote his own version.
The model for the main character was the favorite model of the artist Quiz Meran. Some art critics associate the image of the picture with the name of the actress Margaret Bellange, better known as the mistress of the French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. Like it or not, the character was already well known to Mane – while in Italy in the 1850s, he worked on a copy of Venus Urbinsky by the great Titian.
On the canvas there is a repeated repetition of the shape of a triangle: a pillow, a drapery, and even a black woman with a bouquet in her hands – everything fits into this figure. The image seems to be flat, in some places the paint goes beyond the contour. The bouquet is written symbolically, stained.
The color scheme is very limited: the artist took white, black and blue tones as a basis and diluted them only slightly with warm brown-golden and red. To transfer the female body and the bed used light cream shades. They contrast beautifully with the dark green drapery chosen for the background. Such a sharp color transition visually divides the web into two parts horizontally.
The black kitten at the foot of the bed is barely visible, but it plays the role of an important compositional point on the canvas.
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