The bulge in the left breast is large and distinct. The nipple and areola appear swollen and the skin nearby looks dimpled–puckered. It takes Dr. James Stark exactly 2 seconds to make his diagnosis.
“That woman’s got breast cancer,” Stark whispers to his wife as they stand in Florence’s Church of San Lorenzo. He has just diagnosed the subject of Michelangelo’s 500-year-old sculpture called Night.
Over the years, art historians have suggested that the breast is malformed because Michelangelo was unfamiliar with female anatomy, or that it is the result of a sculpting error. But until June 1999–when Stark visited the chapel–no one had diagnosed the prominent lump.
“I’ve been . . . [diagnosing breast cancer] for 25 years. I looked at the breast for 2 seconds and I just knew,” says Stark, medical director of the Cancer Treatment Centers of America and associate professor of medicine at the Eastern Virginia Medical School. For the next 1 1/2 years, Stark and Jonathan Nelson–a scholar in Renaissance art and a visiting professor at the Florentine campuses of New York University and Syracuse University–thoroughly investigated Stark’s theory. Skeptical at first, Nelson has since become convinced that Michelangelo knew the woman had a fatal disease.