This book accompanies an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum and it surveys the portrayal of the nude in art and photography, with particular attention given to the female nude from classical Greece to the present day. Recent moral and social changes, as well as aesthetic and technological developments have produced new attitudes to the role and meaning of the naked body in art. The author who studies the changing attitudes from the perspective of the eighties was editor of and contributor to "100 Great Paintings in the V&A".