A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350-1750

Looking at painting and sculpture from the fourteenth through the eighteenth centuries, this provocative work focuses on the symbolism of the female breast to open a dazzling interpretive view of Western European history over four centuries. Margaret R. Miles finds that while in 1350 the Virgin's bare breast represented nourishment and loving care—God's provision for the Christian—by 1750, artistic representations of the breast were either erotic or medical. The breast had lost its meaning ...