The first large-scale depiction of a female nude in Italian painting was the "Sleeping Venus", also known as the Dresden Venus, by the outstanding High Renaissance master Giorgione of Venice, 1508

The first large-scale depiction of a female nude in Italian painting was the "Sleeping Venus", also known as the Dresden Venus, by the outstanding High Renaissance master Giorgione of Venice, 1508. The "Sleeping Venus" is considered the first painting in which the main subject is natural nudity and the beauty of the body.

Giorgione's Venus came into the world almost at the same time as Leonardo da Vinci's Gioconda. Both paintings were groundbreaking for their time, and both became the source of a kind of canon, the basis for many future repetitions, allusions and quotations. Titian, who for a time was regarded as the creator of the picture (in reality he finished it, painting the landscape after Giorgione's death in 1510), returned to this subject later, trying to create a similar reading of nudity, the same composition and pose, with varying degrees of success, as is clearly seen in his Venus of Urbino. Giorgione's Venus influenced the work of Velázquez, Giordano and Poussin; variations on her are found in Dürer, Cranach the Elder, Rubens, Boucher, Fragonard, Ingres and even Manet.