Nude (art) freestanding statue of a nude since antiquity, several decades before Michelangelo's massive "David" (1501–04). Nudes in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling reestablished a tradition of male nudes in depictions of Biblical stories; the subject of the martyrdom of the near-naked Saint Sebastian had already become highly popular. The monumental female nude returned to Western art in 1486 with "The Birth of Venus" by Sandro Botticelli for the Medici family, who also owned the classical Venus de' Medici, whose pose Botticelli adapted. The "Dresden Venus" of Giorgione (c. 1510), also drawing on classical models, showed a reclining female nude in a landscape,
Sandro Botticelli and then his friends and ... [others] had not come to his assistance, he would have almost died of hunger. The extent of Savonarola's influence on Botticelli remains uncertain; his brother Simone was more clearly a follower. The story, sometimes seen, that he had destroyed his own paintings on secular subjects in the notorious ""Bonfire of the Vanities"" is not told by Vasari. Vasari's assertion that Botticelli produced nothing after coming under the influence of Savonarola is not accepted by modern art historians. "The Mystical Nativity", Botticelli's only painting to carry an actual date, if one cryptically expressed, comes from