The Sculptor

Cathy’s eyes landed on her copy of Slumbering in the Stone on the nightstand. Her dream quickly evaporating, the residue of her fear, however, remained. And for reasons Cathy Hildebrant would never quite understand, she instinctively opened Slumbering in the Stone to a page she had dog-eared the night before-just one of the many she had marked with the hopes of later finding a key into The Michelangelo Killer’s mind.

The photograph at the top of the page was a detail of Michelangelo’s Night, one of six marble figures the artist carved from 1520-1534 for the Medici Chapel in the Church of San Lorenzo, Florence -for the tombs of Dukes Giuliano and Lorenzo de’Medici specifically. The two marble façades were almost identical in their conception-each with an idealized marble statue of the Medici duke seated in a shallow niche above the sarcophagus that contained his remains. Two nude allegorical figures reclined on each of the curved sarcophagi lids-Night and Day for Giuliano, Dusk and Dawn for Lorenzo. The text to which Cathy had unconsciously turned read as follows:

With regard to Night specifically, scholars have long pondered over the unusual shape of the figure’s left breast. As I mentioned previously in our discussion of the proportional ratios in the Rome Pietà, art historians-and more recently, even plastic surgeons-have long argued that the execution of Night’s left breast once again reflects the artist’s supposed unconcern or unfamiliarity with the nude female figure. True, as in all of Michelangelo’s females, the breasts are misshapen and awkwardly “slapped onto” an undeniably masculine torso. However-even though there is a consensus amongst modern scholars that the unusual appearance of Night’s left breast is intentional and not a result of an aesthetic error or the statue’s slightly unfinished state-in a recent study of the figure, an oncologist with the Cancer Treatment Centers of America found in Night’s left breast three abnormalities associated with locally advanced breast cancer: a large bulge to the breast contour medial to the nipple; a swollen nipple-areola complex; and an area of skin retraction just lateral to the nipple-all of which indicate a tumor just medial to the nipple.

As the noted oncologist accurately points out, these abnormalities do not appear in the right breast of Night or in the companion figure of Dawn-or in any other of Michelangelo’s female figures for that matter. Hence, the evidence strongly suggests that Michelangelo used for his model a woman-dead or alive-with advanced breast cancer, and thus accurately reproduced the physical anomalies in marble.

Yet, despite the detail of the diseased breast itself, curiously, once again we see both breasts awkwardly joined with a masculine frame-as if Michelangelo’s understanding of the female could go no further than a narrow and objective appraisal of the “parts” which differentiate the two sexes, but could never quite grasp how those parts worked together within the whole. Then again, there is the theory that Michelangelo might have intentionally sculpted his female figures as such-masculine with female parts-simply because, as we discussed earlier, he viewed the male body as aesthetically superior.

Nevertheless, given that Michelangelo depicted lumps in only one of the four naked breasts that adorn the Medici Chapel-and given that Night, the “darkest” and most allegorically ominous of all the figures, should be the one depicted with the ravaging disease-there can be no doubt that Michelangelo not only recognized the lump as not just an aesthetic anomaly, but also intentionally sculpted Night’s “disease of the breasts”-a disease during the Renaissance which was thought to have been caused by an excess of black bile-as just one of the many subtle details that comprise the metaphorical statement of the façade as a whole. However, the degree to which Michelangelo understood the disease as a form of cancer-that is, if he understood the reason behind the lumpy breast in a context other than traditional Renaissance “humor-based” medicine-is still open for debate.

Against the collage of disjointed images that had been her dream, Cathy sat up in the Polks’ guest bed searching the photograph of Night for a long time. She remembered vividly the circumstances surrounding the picture-a picture she had snapped on her old Nikon while still a graduate student at Harvard. At the time she had never thought she would use it for a book, let alone in such a prophetic context with regard to the disease that murdered her mother. Indeed, it was on the very afternoon that Cathy dropped off the film of Night at the photo lab in Florence that her mother dropped the terrible news over the telephone.

“I don’t want you to worry, Cat,” Kyon Kim had said. “We Korean women are strong. I’m gonna be just fine.”