Michelangelo may have deliberately depicted breast cancer. “Scholars have argued for years over the unusual misshapen
appearance of the left breast of Michelangelo’s marble statue Night.
The statue, in the Medici chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo,
Florence, shows an obvious large bulge in the breast next to the
swollen nipple, causing tethering and retraction of the skin on the
opposite side.

The left breast is quite different from the right and from the breasts on
Dawn, another figure in the Medici Chapel, or in the many other
depictions of women by Michaelangelo.

Experts have agreed that its unusual appearance is intentional and not
due to an error but art historians and plastic surgeons have argued
that it reflects the artist’s supposed lack of interest in, or unfamiliarity
with, the nude female figure.

Now, Dr James Stark, a cancer specialist at the Cancer Treatment
Centers of America in Portsmouth, Virginia, and Jonathan Nelson, an
art historian at New York University, claim that Michelangelo
deliberately set out to portray a woman with breast cancer. ” Independent