PARIS (AFP).- Edouard Manet's "Olympia" will go on display with a kindred painting next month in Venice, in the work's much anticipated first trip out of Paris since 1890, France's Musee d'Orsay said Wednesday.

"Exceptionally, and for the first time, I asked the President of the Republic to lend out the Olympia, which belongs to France's heritage," museum president Guy Cogeval told AFP.

The French painter's depiction of a reclining woman will be featured for the first time alongside Titian's nude "Venus of Urbino", from which Manet drew inspiration, and will be lent to Venice by a Florence museum.

"It's every art historian's obsession to bring together these two great works of art, of which one served as a model for the other," Cogeval said.

While Titian painted a courtesan in the image of a goddess, Manet depicted a cold and dominating woman, according to James H. Rubin, art history professor at Stony Brook University in New York.

The Doge's Palace gallery will feature the paintings in its "Manet: Return to Venice" exhibition from April 24 to August 11.



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