Early familiarity with nudity in art is at the same time an aid to the attainment of a proper attitude towards purity in nature.
"He who has once learnt," as Hoeller remarks, "to enjoy peacefully nakedness in art, will be able to look on nakedness in nature as on a work of art." Casts of classic nude statues and reproductions of the pictures of the old Venetian and other Italian masters may fittingly be used to adorn schoolrooms, not so much as objects of instruction as things of beauty with which the child cannot too early become familiarized.

In Italy it is said to be usual for school classes to be taken by their teachers to the art museums with good results; such visits form part of the official scheme of education.
There can be no doubt that such early familiarity with the beauty of nudity in classic art is widely needed among all social classes and in many countries.

It is to this defect of our education that we must attribute the occasional, and indeed in America and England frequent, occurrence of such incidents as petitions and protests against the exhibition of nude statuary in art museums, the display of pictures so inoffensive as Leighton's "Bath of Psyche" in shop windows, and the demand for the draping of the naked personifications of abstract virtues in architectural street decoration.

So imperfect is still the education of the multitude that in these matters the ill-bred fanatic of pruriency usually gains his will.

Such a state of things cannot but have an unwholesome reaction on the moral atmosphere of the community in which it is possible.