Michelangelo!
Great quote! Wasn't aware of. And Michelagelo is my sculptural hero; his David, the epitome of a man- -gay or straignt! But my literary (and gay) hero is Oscar Wilde, and his aesthetic was rather the opposite: he excelled in the poetry of the artfully-artificial (e.g. The Happy Prince). There is a longer story in this dichotomy of clothed vs nude, nature vs artefact. As modern men, we shed our clothes, and with them, all artifice, all hypocritical pretence, but it doesn't mean we revert back to the 'noble savage'; we retain the best that millennia of civilisation have produced (in terms of ethics, aesthetics and reason); we regain freedom but we do not go back to the primitive, and we are not enslaved by the material constraints that primitive man was subjected to. Simply put, the naked body is beautiful in a particular context, as the clothed one, in its own. That said, I would enthusiastically go for visitors' nudity in, say, an art gallery. It has actually been done recently. In Paris, where else! :)
I agree with Michaelangelo, and he certainly had an eye for form. Regarding your 'noble savage' comment; is there not something of the primitive inside us all? I recently had a novel published featuring an island in the South Pacific where nudity was always the norm, and there were no machines nor electronic technology following a major solar event. I like to get back to nature.
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