They employed diverse means: in Italy through a return to the models of ancient Greek and Roman art, and in northern Europe through refinements to the technique of painting in oils that enabled painters to capture textures-of flesh, of hair, of the sparkle in an eye-with unprecedented truth to nature. After 1400, with the waning of the Middle Ages, artists depicted nudes as increasingly three-dimensional, vibrant, and lifelike- in short, more immediate and real. The nude-the unclothed or partially clothed human body-has been featured in European art for millennia.
