Olympia, by Edward Manet was a very controversial painting in the era it was made. The fact that the woman in this painting is nude is one thing, but the fact that she is also making eye contact with the viewer, who could be a male viewer, made it all the worse and more scandalous. The face that Manet gave Olympia in the painting, humanized prostitution.Many of the men who knew the woman in the painting personally, were outraged when they saw this painting hanging in the Salon while they were with their wives. There was a separate salon made for such paintings called the Salon de Refuses. This was Manet's way of expressing the real life people of Paris. He used the sharp contrast of the dark colors of the background and the light colors of the woman to draw the viewer's eye toward the woman. Margaret Atwood wrote a poem about this painting entitled "Manet's Olympia". In this poem she speaks of the closed window, if there are any, so that nobody would be able to see the "...indoor sin..." going on in this room. She also takes into account the body shape of this woman saying that it is, "...unfragile, defiant...". This is not the iconic woman, but the everyday woman one would see around town. The servant in the background is seen offering Olympia a beautiful bouquet of flowers, possibly from a man she recently saw. This, of course, also adds to the scandalous feelings of this painting that was part of the reason in creating the Salon de Refuses.