The Art Of The Nipple

"When James Hall, the art historian, tackles Michelangelo, he is tackling a figure as gigantic and paradoxical as the artist's own David. Michelangelo's strength was one that many of his fellow artists and contemporaries would have considered a weakness - his sustained interest in the lone figure under stress, in crisis or transition.
His art was made for an age that was emphatically post-heroic, recognising bitterly and protesting that the age of chivalry was over. It was technically brilliant, erotically charged and inherently unstable.

Hall reads and thinks like a scholar but it helps that he writes with the confidence of a hack. "Michelangelo is the poet laureate of male nipples," he writes. "David's nipples are erect, and stand to electro-charged attention."
Yes, well...whatever. Better get the library ticket out then.
Michelangelo and the Reinvention of the Human Body, James Hall, Chatto and Windus 25 pounds.
Irish Art