Abstract: The opposition between the naked and the clothed body is one of the most productive elements of cultural history and is often associated with the dichotomy between nature and culture. According to tradition, nudity stimulates the imagination and is the imaginary origin of art. The article examines this narrative in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and in the eighteenth century in Rousseau, the Encyclopédie, and Winckelmann, in order to show its poetic productivity, but also its colonial entanglements.
