the caricatural and grotesque animal that Black people are frequently made to represent in the nineteenth century." Many critics have applauded Manet in his use of white and black in the painting, an alternative to the tradition of chiaroscuro. Charles Bernheimer has responded, According to Timothy Paul, some black feminists, including Lorraine O' Grady, have argued that it is not for artistic convention that Manet included Laure but to create an ideological binary between black and white, good and bad, clean and dirty and as such "inevitably reformulates the Cartesian perspectival logic that allows whiteness to function as the only subject of consideration". When paired with a lighter skin tone, the Black female model stands in as signifier to all of the racial stereotypes of the West. Confrontational gaze and oppositional gaze In Lorraine O'Grady's essay titled "Olympia's Maid: Reclaiming Black Female Subjectivity", she asserts, "Olympia's maid, like all other 'peripheral Negroes, is a robot conveniently made to disappear into the background drapery. While the confrontational gaze of Olympia is often referenced as the pinnacle of defiance toward patriarchy, the oppositional gaze of Olympia's maid is ignored; she is part of the background with little to no attention given to the critical role of her presence. O'Grady points out that we know she represents 'Jezebel and Mammy' "and best of all, she is not a real person", rather she is object to the objectified and excluded from sexual difference according to Freudian theory. While Olympia looks directly at the viewer, her maid, too, is looking back. In her essay "Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire and Their Homegirls: Developing an Oppositional Gaze toward the Images of Black Women", Catherine West concludes that by claiming an oppositional gaze we can identify, criticize, resist and transform these and other oppressive images of Black women. Events In January 2016, a Luxembourg performance artist, Deborah De Robertis, lay on the floor in front of the painting nude and mimicked the pose of the subject. She was arrested for indecent exposure. Precedents In part, the painting was inspired by Titian's Venus of Urbino (c. 1534), which in turn derives from Giorgione's Sleeping Venus (c. 1510). The Titian has two fully clothed women, presumably servants, in the background. Léonce Bénédite was the first art historian to explicitly acknowledge the similarity to the Venus of Urbino in 1897. There is also some similarity to Francisco Goya's La maja desnuda (c.