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A
rtists' representations of the naked female body have been shaped by changes in fashion, according to art historian Anne Hollander in Fabric of Vision: Dress and Drapery in Painting. A fifteenth-century Eve by Hans Memling, naked but for her fig leaf, has the same delicate breasts and swelling hips as the clothed subject of a van Eyck portrait; a century later, in Venice, when the fashion was for large, imposing shoulders and arms, a naked Proserpine by Tintoretto has the same muscular arms and negligible breasts as those of a fully dressed woman in a contemporaneous portrait by Veronese. The eye, Hollander suggests, sees the body clothed, even when naked.
Her point is illustrated by Michael Thompson's interpretation ...