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Every year, millions of visitors flock to the Sistine Chapel to admire the frescoes painted by Michelangelo during the Renaissance. Those on the ceiling of the religious building represent various episodes from the Bible. Experts say Michelangelo hid a surprising medical detail in his flood panel.
As its name suggests, “the Flood” alludes to an episode in the Bible during which God caused torrential rains to punish men for their wickedness and perversity. Only one man, Noah, escaped by building an ark in which his family and a couple of each animal species took refuge.
In his panel for the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo sets out to represent a group of individuals trying to flee the rising waters. On the left of this fresco, we see an almost naked young woman. She only wears a blue cape, which reveals her chest. The way Michelangelo painted one of her breasts attracted the attention of several experts from Germany, Italy, France, Austria and the United Kingdom.
In a study published in the journal The Breast, researchers affirm that the right breast of this female character presents significant anomalies. Her nipple is retracted and deformed, while the skin around it is deeply indented, as if there is a scar. There are also slight lumps in the upper inner part of the breast and towards the armpit, which could indicate enlarged lymph nodes. And therefore possibly cancer.
Specialists arrived at this conclusion after applying the precepts of icono-diagnostics, a discipline which consists of diagnosing diseases based on human representations appearing in works of art. For the purposes of their study, the researchers compared the chest of the young woman in the “Flood” to those of other female characters by Michelangelo. “It emerges from our observations that Michelangelo knew how to represent healthy breasts of different sizes and morphologies and that he adapted them to the female figures of the Bible“, they say.
In other words, the artist deliberately chose to represent the chest of his female character in this way. It remains to be seen why. Scholars theorize that Michelangelo made this decision to refer to human decadence. “In accordance with Neoplatonism – a school of thought that influenced Michelangelo – the quest for beauty and harmony could lead to immortality, while physical disfigurement or illness was an expression of the spiritual abyss.“, we can read in their study. The sight of this right breast would therefore be a warning for the spectator.
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