The Renaissance nude is the naked body shown as something to admire instead of something to hide, modeled on Greek and Roman statues and sheltered behind myth or scripture. The picture that shows it best is Botticelli's Birth of Venus, painted around 1484 for a cousin of Lorenzo de' Medici.
Artists in Italy had ancient marbles coming out of the ground and a Church that read nakedness as sin. Each famous nude of these years had to satisfy both, and the goddess, the shepherd boy and the first woman of Genesis were the ways to do it.
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The tidy version says the nude vanished for a thousand years and came back with Donatello's bronze David, in Florence. The first half of that story is wrong.
In Pisa, around 1260, Nicola Pisano carved a naked, muscular Hercules on the pulpit of the baptistery and gave him the name of a Christian virtue, Fortitude. A Roman sarcophagus in the nearby Camposanto shows a figure that looks very much like him, and it may well have been his model.
So the naked body did not simply vanish for a thousand years. What the Renaissance won back, one disguise at a time, was the nude as a figure worth looking at, and every famous nude in this story wears a disguise. I think the disguises are the real story, and the last one on this page comes off in a duke's own letter.
What You'll Discover
What Donatello's David is wearing.
Where the Venus first hung.
What Michelangelo's David was fitted with.
What Dürer borrowed from a statue.
What the duke called Titian's Venus.