"And when Manet painted his Olympia in 1863, and changed the course of modern art by provoking the mother of all art scandals with her, to whom was he paying homage? Manet’s Olympia is the Rokeby Venus brought up to date — a whore descended from a goddess." Waldemar Januszczak, Times Online (October 8, 2006). Still sexy after all these years. Retrieved on March 14, 2008.
The engravings of such artists as en:Wenceslaus Hollar and en:Jacques Callot show, according to Veliz, "an almost documentary interest in the form and detail of European costume in the second quarter of the seventeenth century".
The painting was not universally accepted as Velázquez's work on its reintroduction to the public. The critic, James Grieg hypothesised that it was by en:Anton Raphael Mengs—although he found little support for his idea—and there was more serious discussion about the possibility of Velázquez's son-in-law and pupil, Juan del Mazo as the artist. MacLaren p. 76 dismisses both claims: "The supposed signatures of Juan Bautista Mazo and Anton Raphael Mengs in the bottom left corner are purely accidental marks."
"The more frequent appearance of the motif in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is probably owing to the prestige of the antique figure of Hermaphrodite....In Renaissance art the earliest example of a nude woman lying with her back to the spectator is the en:Giulio Campagnola engraving, which probably represents a design by Giorgione"....Clark, 391, note to page 150.
