Strike a Pose: Odalisque

Each installment of our Strike a Pose series features one of art history’s most seminal postures. Mediums range from sculpture to oils and everything in between. You can find our article about Odalisque at my.meural.com/editorial/66.

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. 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.

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). 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. 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.