Michelangelo's David and our warped sense of what is appropriate

 I have to do a bit of cross-posting! 

Sometimes on my blog Like Mother, Like Daughter, I comment on a story -- and what I say could just as well go over here. 

So here's what I said, with a little extra, about Michelangelo's David; commentary that arose due to an eruption of a not-uncommon frisson over the question of its nudity:

Hillsdale is right here: Hillsdale College breaks ties with Tallahassee school over Michelangelo’s ‘David’ controversy

We have to understand what culture is, so that, for one thing, we can understand what pornography is, and reject it. The David is the very pinnacle of high art because it radiates the truth of man as he is meant to be, as he was created by God. 

What’s notable about the nude form as depicted in the statue (and other such sculptures of which it is the apotheosis) is the perfect balance, proportion, and hierarchy of humanity, reason, and spirit. Yes, we (and children) see his genitals. 

They are, in ancient fashion, “at rest” and minimized in comparison with his chest (his courage and thumos) and his noble head (his mind, Reason). We need precisely this depiction — among other qualities (its beauty, its truth about the actual Biblical figure, from whom Our Lord received His own manhood, ultimately), as an image against which to measure degraded ones.

Here I will add: 

The question might arise whether it is not simply a matter of keeping private parts, well, private. I appreciate that idea and normally am in favor of it, but, given that this statue and many others in the Greek and Roman classical tradition, which the Renaissance artist Michelangelo was recovering in his own fashion, have for centuries been on display in public places where children abound, and given that our age is hardly the most prudish of these, perhaps it is we whose sensibilities are not quite calibrated in the way they ought to be.

Previous generations thought that the message I express here about the relative proportions of the parts of the human body in the figure of David, "a man after God's own heart," was important enough to override concerns about modesty. The ancients thought that modesty, precisely in the sense of fittingness, paradoxically demands our gaze. 

We today have a lot to learn about all these subjects if we hope to recover truths previously known. We are far from being experts on the topic; we are in fact, deformed, and we ought to question our reactions continually, as we have lost all sense of normalcy; we, whose culture abounds with casual pornography, certainly have no inkling of what decency could possibly be. 

Let the works of the past be known and not hidden away. We need all the help we can get.