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 earliest popes seem to have been mainly Botticelli's responsibility, at least as far as producing the cartoons went. Of those surviving, most scholars agree that ten were designed by Botticelli, and five probably at least partly by him, although all have been damaged and restored. The "Punishment of the Sons of Corah" contains what was for Botticelli an unusually close, if not exact, copy of a classical work. This is the rendering in the centre of the north side of the Arch of Constantine in Rome, which he repeated in about 1500 in "The Story of Lucretia". If he was