Rokeby Venus have been able to see it on occasion throughout its history. Velázquez's portrait is a staging of a private moment of intimacy and a dramatic departure from the classical depictions of sleep and intimacy found in works from antiquity and Venetian art that portray Venus. However, the simplicity with which Velázquez displays the female nude—without jewellery or any of the goddess's usual accessories—was echoed in later nude studies by Ingres, Manet, and Baudry, among others. In addition, Velázquez's depiction of Venus as a reclining nude viewed from the rear was a rarity before that time, although the pose has been
David Rokeby some off-the-shelf, some rare and esoteric, and some cooked up by Rokeby himself. Initially, in 1982, much more of the system was homemade. His circuitry, designed to speed up the response of the sluggish Apple II, was still not fast enough to analyze an image from an ordinary video camera, so he built his own low-res device: a little box with 64 light sensors behind a plastic Fresnel lens. But Very Nervous System has been evolving for 13 years, during which time the world has seen any number of technological revolutions. So Rokeby now has a lot more store-bought components