For the first time since 1890, Edouard Manet's seminal "Olympia" will leave Paris in order to hang alongside a kindred painting in Venice next month, announced France's Musee d'Orsay.

"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.

Manet's Olympia depicts a reclining nude woman next to her clothed maid in a stark light. Wjat most shocked audiences when the painting was first presented at the 1865 Paris Salon was not her nudity, but the sitter's steady gaze and the blatant details indicating that she was a prostitute.

Olympia will be shown with Titian's nude "Venus of Urbino," the painting which inspired Manet, on loan from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

"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.

The Doge's Palace gallery will present both works in the exhibition "Manet: Return to Venice," from April 24 to August 11.