THE IMAGE OF THE BODY Aspects of the Nude <i> by Michael Gill (Doubleday: $40; 476 pp.)</i>

Michael Gill introduces his book on the meaning of the nude by letting the reader in on his dilemma about choosing a cover photograph. What image could represent a study of the body? Whether pin-up or classical, any nude carries associations, he points out as he explores the train of thought that led him to photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s studio to commission the striking jacket illustration.

“Must they have heads?” asked the photographer about his assignment. “Our faces reveal our individuality,” the author muses. “The body alone would better suggest the universality of the theme.” He wonders whether the models should be “perfect.” And young? If so, how young? Gill introduces the works that gave him ideas for the design, and gradually the reader finds himself deep in an artistic discussion of painting, sculpture and photography.

This book was originally conceived as a television series, like the “Civilization” series Gill produced in collaboration with Sir Kenneth Clark. The structure of the resulting book shows its origins, presenting a smooth marriage of text and pictures in episodic chapters. The hand-in-hand-with-the-author style has a charm and an immediacy, even if the companionable perusal of such subjects as physical suffering in Christian art and exploitation of the erotic seem arbitrarily chosen from a vast subject.