This has been a big year for the classical nude. But then again, when is it not?

From the moment the Renaissance uncovered Roman copies of sculptures of ancient Greek gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, the nude has defined our highest aspirations for the body, from the art of Donatello and Michelangelo to the neoclassical works of turn-of-the-19th century Paris to the highly formal, erotically charged photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, just to name a few.

“Not only is it the longest lasting, most influential visual form for representing the human body up to the present day, but it has also become so powerfully naturalized as merely ‘the nude’ that we have often lost the ability to see it as a specific historical type, with a particular history, geography and canon,” curator Jonathan David Katz wrote in the catalog for “Classical Nudes and the Making of Queer History,” at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in Manhattan last fall. ...

For years, he graced The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Velez Blanco Patio, just off the Great Hall – a paean to the kind of youthful male beauty that stretches back to the Archaic Greeks. But all of that came to a crashing halt on the evening of Oct. 6, 2002 when Adam, a 15th-century funerary marble by Tullio Lombardo, fell off his pedestal and smashed into 28 pieces.

It turns out that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could put Adam back together again. A dozen years after the unsettling incident, The Met unveiled the 6-foot, 3 ½-inch statue, along with a video on its reconstruction, last fall in a new, temporary space. And yet, it seems fitting to talk about the work in this season that is dedicated to Adam’s fall from spiritual grace and the Resurrection of the new Adam in the person of Jesus Christ.

Part of what makes this sculpture’s reconstitution and thus the subsequent exhibit so incredibly moving is the subject’s stunning beauty to begin with. The thick curls framing a face characterized by large eyes, a straight nose and full lips and winding about a graceful neck. The high chest, taut abs, long, slim haunches and sinewy calves and arms. Adam’s gorgeous, and so we can say with Hamlet, “What a fall was there.” ...

Classical nudes: The not-so-obscure objects of our desire

After Eden: The Met’s resurrection of Adam