The Salon jury that rejected Manet's Olympia had a name. Largely, it was Cabanel's.

Alexandre Cabanel was born in Montpellier in 1823 and climbed the French academic system with total precision. He won the Prix de Rome at twenty-two. He joined the École des Beaux-Arts faculty. He was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He became a fixture on the Salon jury — the committee that decided which paintings France's public would see and which ones would disappear.

In 1863, Cabanel exhibited The Birth of Venus at the Salon. Napoleon III purchased it on the spot. It was a reclining nude — technically polished, mythologically dressed, safely titillating within the conventions the establishment had approved. That same year, Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe was rejected by the Salon jury and routed to the Salon des Refusés, where crowds came to mock it. The difference between the two paintings was not the presence of a nude female body. It was whether that body was performing for the viewer's comfort. Cabanel's Venus was. Manet's was not.

The transaction was clean. The Kingmakers had taste preferences that aligned precisely with what the market and the state wanted to purchase. Cabanel provided it. Napoleon III got a Venus for his private collection. The machinery continued.

Cabanel trained hundreds of students. He sat on the jury that Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir spent years trying to get past. He was not a villain in the cinematic sense. He was something more useful to the establishment than a villain.

He was reliable.

He died in 1889. The Birth of Venus is still reproduced everywhere. His name is remembered primarily in relation to the painters who fought him.