“What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot grasp the fact that a human foot is more noble than a shoe and a the human skin is more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed.” – Michelangelo
It is human to decorate oneself, but humanity starts without decoration and that is often forgotten. The puritan impulse that still flows through America and elsewhere looks for something wrong with the unadorned and naked. We do it without being conscious of it, like a remnant racist not being aware of their own prejudice.
A huge industry has made many people a lot of money building on this. I am not talking about pornography, which at least has some semblance of honesty about it. At least you know what they are trying to evoke in a person. I am not defending porn, just stating that we know what it is and what it is trying to do.
I am talking about marketing and advertising. That is the industry that plays us like a fiddle. That is the industry that tells you to look for the skin and in the next breath tells you to cover it up.
What Michelangelo knew was that for all the finery Florence and Rome in the Renaissance could display to the world, it could not outshine the beauty he found in the human body. And considering the fact that his nude sculpture, ‘David’ is probably the single most popular object of any sort from that era, his statement has been proven true.
Drawing © 2022 Marty Coleman | napkindad.com