If draperies are a hindrance to the conveyance of tactile values, they
make the perfect rendering of movement next to impossible. To realise
the play of muscle everywhere, to get the full sense of the various
pressures and resistances, to receive the direct inspiration of the
energy expended, we must have the nude; for here alone can we watch
those tautnesses of muscle and those stretchings and relaxings and
ripplings of skin which, translated into similar strains on our own
persons, make us fully realise movement. Here alone the translation,
owing to the multitude and the clearness of the appeals made, is
instantaneous, and the consequent sense of increased capacity almost as
great as can be attained; while in the draped figure we miss all the
appeal of visible muscle and skin, and realise movement only after a
slow translation of certain functional outlines, so that the sense of
capacity which we receive from the perception of movement is increased
but slightly.

We are now able to understand why every art whose chief preoccupation is
the human figure must have the nude for its chief interest; why, also,
the nude is the most absorbing problem of classic art at all times. Not
only is it the best vehicle for all that in art which is directly
life-confirming and life-enhancing, but it is itself the most
significant object in the human world. The first person since the great
days of Greek sculpture to comprehend fully the identity of the nude
with great figure art, was Michelangelo. Before him, it had been
studied for scientific purposes--as an aid in rendering the draped
figure. He saw that it was an end in itself, and the final purpose of
his art. For him the nude and art were synonymous. Here lies the secret
of his successes and his failures.