Baron Wilhelm Von Gloeden's interest in photography and the gift of a camera led him to pursue photography as a career in 1889. at first he sold postcards picturing landscapes, monuments, and people of sicily but soon his nude studies of young men and boys of Taormina became his principal work and were avidly collected.  
 
Italy's fascist government destroyed or damaged many of Von Gloeden's 3,000 glass plate negatives, all of which were confiscated as pornographic material. by the time his negatives were returned to the caretakers of his work after world war ii, only a few hundred remained intact; nonetheless, what survived was enthusiastically rediscovered in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Von Gloeden's great success as a photographer of the male nude was in part due to his preference for setting his subjects in the theater of the antique. His suggestion of allegory, selection of classical sites, and use of artifacts aestheticized and thus softened the obvious and often charged eroticism of his images. His pictures are of interest today as celebrations of male sensuality and beauty in photographic art.
 
– Cynthia Fredette, Reflections in a glass eye: Works from the International Center of Photography Collection, New York: Bulfinch press in association with the International Center of Photography, 1999, p. 230.

In a more curious than obsessive endeavor to look inside bodies, to find the genesis of a visual representation of the spirit and their most mythical subjectivities, Von Gloeden and Guglielmo von Plüschow imitate in photography the essence of Greeks, such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann praised in 1700. This Hellenistic observation of the body conveys today in the queer faun of Rodolpho Parigi, crossing centuries of possibilities for the same body and finding Léon Galand's Narcisus of 1904. 

Awarded the best artist at the Salon des Artistes Français of 1904, Léon Galand reappears with his narcissus in our exhibition. According to the myth, when Narcissus was born, one of the oracles, called Tiresias, said that Narcissus would be very attractive and will have a very long life. However, he should not admire his beauty, or rather, see his face, as it would curse his own life. In addition to having stunning beauty, which attracted many people, both men and women, Narciso was arrogant and vain. He fell in love with his own image, seeing it reflected in a lake. With his excessive vanity and underestimating the nymph Eco, she cast a spell on Narcissus, who languished watching himself reflected on the river until he died.

what is history without its own weight, without the contrived character of time weighing on the artist’s works. The absence of rules  allows a body-scale drawing by Picabia to interact with Solange Pessoa’s erotic drawings that evoke images founded in Brazilian archeological sites. While intersecting Mapplethorpe’s male body adoration and Wilhelm Von Gloeden’s mythological narratives, the show also converges the perspective of Tarsila do Amaral and Eliseu Visconti as modern observers of form. All these perspective rules are doomed by time and sensibility to understand the body as a whole of an image.

‘Tell the Pope this is a small issue that can easily be fixed; if he can fix the world, fixing the painting will take little time’

(Vasari, ‘Vita di Michelangelo’).  

–  Michelangelo when asked by the Pope to cover up the nakedness in the Sistine Chapel.

'Man's naked form... belongs to no particular moment in history;

it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.' 

– Auguste Rodin

1800 is a significant date in the history of the representation of the male nude in art. It carries in its historical and political context a specific morality regarding the male body. The taboo was generated and supported by The Age of Reason between its interpretation lines at the end of the 18th Century. Topics about the desire for male bodies began to fetishize the notions of these bodies. As the female desire was extremely repressed, the homoerotic perspective on male nudes takes the stage, creating an anthologically homo-gaze idea about the naked male body.

From Greek gods to biblical representations of David and Jesus Christ, The male body walked towards the object of desire, reappearing in bathing scenes and studies of the living model. The natural way would be to explore this body's source of desire, and this exploration found fertile ground in 70s' New York. Male nudity also a subject of lust and mundane beauty.

'The galleries were scared to show them'

- Factory studio boss Vincent Fremont on Andy Warhol’s

Sex Parties / torso series

'What Antonio Manuel is doing is the experimental exercise of freedom. He is not trying to dominate others. It is only proposing total authenticity, which is pure creativity.'

– Mário Pedrosa, 1970

“Appropriation, because I don’t have one; voodoo; economics; totemism; they’re a convenient size for the lap; fetishism; compact power; Dad; why make the whole bloke?; gents; gnomey; because you don’t see them on display much; for religious reasons having to do with the spark. I don’t have one, I’ve got several, actually.”

– Sarah Lucas on her reasons to make so many penises, published in a book of her work: 'Sarah Lucas: After 2005, Before 2012'

Nakedness has no color: this can come as news only to those who have never covered, or been covered by, another naked human being. [...] Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one's nakedness can always be felt, and, sometimes, discerned. This trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one's robes.

― James Baldwin