The ancient Greeks were a decadent people whose sculptures reflected their philosophical melding of the spiritual and the sensual. The Greco-Roman cosplayers that comprised the Italian Renaissance acknowledged the sexual allure of the nude in artwork, albeit grudgingly papering it over as allegorical of Biblical themes. Only in the modern era has there been a refusal to acknowledge the explicit nature of the nude, an historically untenable position that is both naïve in its faith in magical substitution and obscene in its commonplace treatment of the human form.