Tuesday 14 August 2018

[Perspectives] Breast cancer in a Renaissance Book of the Dead



The Lancet Oncology by Emma Nicholls  


PERSPECTIVES|HISTORY OF MEDICINE| VOLUME 19, ISSUE 8, P1023-1024, AUGUST 01, 2018

Walking around galleries of great Renaissance art, many visitors have found themselves staring in puzzlement at female nudes who seem to have oddly shaped breasts. In recent years, a number of medical specialists, working in partnership with art historians, have argued that we should be less quick to dismiss these apparent malformations as the result of artistic ineptitude. Instead, they argue that to the trained eye, these bulges, depressions, and retractions unmistakably signal the willingness of Renaissance artists to depict women with breast pathologies.