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,
Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Brandini "* The same Lady, here surrounded by the masque of Spring, is evidently the subject of a portrait by Botticelli formerly in the Pourtales collection in Paris. This portrait is inscribed "Smeralda Bandinelli"". Rossetti's suggestion that the portrait depicted the model Botticelli used for his "Spring" now seems unlikely. Portrait of a Lady Known as Smeralda Brandini The Portrait of Smeralda Brandini is a tempera on panel painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli of about 1475, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (museum no. CAI.100). The identification of the sitter is based on the old, but probably