Venus in finery The courtesan of the silent screen

Literature, theater, and early cinema are fascinated with the courtesan who not only seduced with her finery, she was seduced by finery, and was thus the ultimate consumer of high fashion. The appealing frisson of the “kept” woman is explored in four early films. The films use Édouard Manet’s famous, and scandalous, painting Olympia as an iconic mise en scène of the courtesan.