Each installment of Strike a Pose features one of art history’s most seminal postures. Mediums range from sculpture to oils and everything in between. (See all installments.)

This week we discuss one that once allowed for the male gaze—and then was used against it (explore the corresponding playlist).

If you encountered Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus in a museum, you might take note of the coloration, the dreamy landscape, and the detail of the linens, but nothing is more apparent than the subject, a nude woman with her eyes closed. Though her hand covers her sex, she is otherwise submissive. (Art enthusiasts might recall this pose as part of the venus pudica.) The viewer feels powerful in his gaze; he can look anywhere, and not be met with another set of eyes. It might also strike you that this painting looks a lot like others you’ve seen—notably Manet’s Olympia, Renoir’s Odalisque, and Ingres’ The Grande Odalisque. But those works would not exist if not for this one. It was the first to establish such a pose, the odalisque. (It is worth noting that it is commonly believed Titian completed the painting after Giorgione’s death, in 1510.)

For a subject to be in the odalisque pose, they must be recumbent, and either fully or partially nude (and, almost always, a woman). For hundreds of years, artists only painted Venus in odalisque; she was the subject in Giorgione’s work, as the title suggests. It is likely that they were afraid of the backlash, should they paint a “mortal” woman with such obvious eroticism. Ironically, the pose didn’t earn its name until artists abandoned Venus as their subject, when 18th century artists (such as Ingres and Delacroix started painting chambermaids from Turkish harems (the name odalisque comes from Odalik, Turkish for chambermaid). As the term jumped from Turkish to English and then French, it absorbed different contexts and connotations, and no longer stood for a maid of a lower social status, but, well, any eroticized Eastern woman reclining on her back. This shift dovetailed with the rise of Orientalism, a movement that spread in France after the failed invasion of Egypt and Syria under Napoleon’s command. Suddenly, middle eastern themes could be found in the work of such artists as Ingres, Delacroix, Tissot, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, who spearheaded the movement. Such themes, though subtle by today’s standards, were quite evident at the time—along with the subject’s eyes, which are no longer closed or cast down, but aimed right at the viewer.

As we’ve seen with other poses (especially the venus pudica), artists have always sought to make it their own, morph it, challenge it even. While Manet’s Olympia wasn’t the first work featuring an odalisque subject directing her gaze outward, it was likely the first to allow her provocation and agency. In fact, when Olympia premiered at the 1865 Salon, it shocked its audience for its reversal of viewer-subject dominance. Here our subject finally owns her sexuality. This was a far cry from the pose’s origin, something Manet was surely attuned to.

By the late 20th century, the world of art would have been unidentifiable to Manet and Ingres (let alone Giorgione and Titian). It goes without saying, but they also wouldn’t have understood the day’s gender politics. And yet if you walked into an art museum, you would see a gender balance that had hardly budged since the Renaissance. In 1989 the odalisque pose was once again famously used—this time for the purposes of the “Guerilla Girls,” an anonymous group of feminist female artists that had formed four years before. The poster, which asked, “Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?” targets the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and brings into focus the traditional gender stereotypes of portraiture: the man is the artist, the woman the subject. The statistic it features is shocking: “Less than 4% of the artists in the Modern Art sections are women, but 76% of the nudes are female.” The image itself is a repurposed version of Ingres’ The Grande Odalisque, with a gorilla mask on the subject—the group’s symbol. The Guerilla Girls are still in action today, with about just as much to fight for; while the statistics might have shifted slightly, the trend hasn’t budged.

Odalisque marks a fitting end for our Strike a Pose series. It represents how one single element of art can be mutated through the history of it, reflecting its most prominent values and urges. What was once a posture used to symbolize one gender encapsulating the other, it stands today as a representation of such an inequality, and the hope for change.