BOOK REVIEW : Vibrant, Idiosyncratic ‘Olympia’ Enriches Knowledge of Manet : OLYMPIA <i> by Otto Friedrich</i> ; HarperCollins $28.00, 336 pages

Edouard Manet’s arresting portrait of his young model Victorine Meurent reclining on a white chaise, wearing only her shoes, a ribbon bow around her neck and a bracelet, becomes the matrix for “Olympia,” Otto Friedrich’s highly personal examination of mid-19th-Century Paris.

Stunned by the stark drama of the painting when he saw it dominating a corridor at the Jeu de Paume museum, the author began to investigate the subject, finding only the scantiest information about Victorine and scarcely more about Manet, a supremely private man who left few personal papers to record his life during one of the most tumultuous eras of French political and cultural history.

Instead of allowing himself to be thwarted by the paucity of original material, Friedrich has adopted the painter’s own technique, fleshing out his central figure with background and foreground detail drawn from existing sources and enhanced by his own imagination.

The result is a vibrant, highly conjectural and idiosyncratic book, enlarging the effect of the many definitive histories of the time without competing with them.

Friedrich investigates those aspects of Parisian life that most fascinate him and, happily for the reader, his consuming interests include some of the most contradictory and eccentric elements influencing French destiny.

Empress Eugenie is dealt with in two long and marvelously detailed chapters, offering not only an overview of the abortive attempt to impose a French emperor upon Mexico but also a corrosive account of the Franco-Prussian war instigated at Eugenie’s whim, a disaster followed by the civil uprising that caused far more privation and suffering than the war itself.

These sections are intensified by fragments of reportage and correspondence by Emil Zola, the Goncourt brothers and others whose lives touched Manet’s at least tangentially.

A chapter called “Nana” explores the anomalous place of prostitution in French life, exploring the economic causes, the uneasy combination of tolerance and contempt with which the women were regarded and the effect of these attitudes on society at large.

Another long section describes the magical transformation of Paris wrought by Georges Haussmann at the behest of Napoleon III, a massive reconstruction that turned an overgrown town into a marvel of civic design.

One of the few reasonably well-documented relationships in Manet’s life, his long connection with the painter Berthe Morisot and her family, is described in two other chapters.

In these the focus narrows to the reactions of contemporary critics toward the revolution taking place in art, a radical change in sensibility that eventually evolved into impressionism.

Now the most universally admired and least controversial of all artistic innovations, it was originally the most reviled.

Friedrich has a grand time quoting the splenetic critics who scorned and derided the works of the men later recognized as masters, saving his sympathy for the privations of those artists less fortunate than Manet.

The painter of “Olympia” and the equally disdained “Dejeuner sur l’Herbe” enjoyed the advantage of a modest private income, although his work remained unsold and unappreciated until near the end of his life. Enchanted by the frothy operettas of Offenbach, Paris summarily rejected the work of Richard Wagner, halting attempted performances of “Tannhauser” by hooting and jeering.

When confronted by Manet’s “Olympia,” first shown in 1865, spectators had to be restrained by uniformed guards from swatting it with their walking sticks, reactions that establish the passionate temper of the era without necessarily connecting the composer and the painter directly.

But as Friedrich rhetorically asks in his preface, “How can we omit Wagner from Manet’s Paris when Manet’s wife played his music to the dying Baudelaire?”

There’s no reason to do so, when Manet and his now-celebrated “Olympia” are transformed from specific subject to general metaphor. The author has included a wealth of surprisingly fresh anecdotal material, asides that enliven the tone of the text and illuminate the personalities involved.

A generous selection of illustrations helps to explain and clarify many of the author’s choices and, ultimately, we learn the fate of the elusive Victorine Meurent, elevated to symbolic status by her chance encounter with Edouard Manet.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Her Monster” by Jeff Collignon (Soho).