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.

[Page heading:  MICHELANGELO]

First, his successes.  Nowhere outside of the best Greek art shall we find, as in Michelangelo’s works, forms whose tactile values so increase our sense of capacity, whose movements are so directly communicated and inspiring.  Other artists have had quite as much feeling for tactile values alone,—­Masaccio, for instance; others still have had at least as much sense of movement and power of rendering it,—­Leonardo, for example; but no other artist of modern times, having at all his control over the materially significant, has employed it as Michelangelo did, on the one subject where its full value can be manifested—­the nude.  Hence of all the achievements of modern art, his are the most invigorating.  Surely not often is our imagination of touch roused as by his Adam in the “Creation,” by his Eve in the “Temptation,” or by his many nudes in the same ceiling of the Sixtine Chapel,—­there for no other purpose, be it noted, than their direct tonic effect!  Nor is it less rare to quaff such draughts of unadulterated energy as we receive from the “God Creating Adam,” the “Boy Angel” standing by Isaiah, or—­to choose one or two instances from his drawings (in their own kind the greatest in existence)—­the “Gods Shooting at a Mark” or the “Hercules and the Lion.”