Sul naso is a journey of discovery into the most embarrassing, prominent, and, above all, revealing feature of our faces: a journey through history, literature, art, and science that compels us to confront our most uncomfortable prejudices and our deepest insecurities. Because, as Pinocchio teaches us, the nose never lies.
There are as many varieties of noses as there are human beings: large or small, straight or crooked, grotesque or discreet, Greek or Roman, painted or sculpted. And there are even more ways of looking at them: with disgust or suspicion, admiration or envy, wonder or mischief, respect or fear. What we rarely stop to consider is that within each of these gazes, and each of these noses, lies a fragment of our culture and history.
Caro Verbeek traces our millennia-long relationship with the feature that, more than any other, lies—quite literally—right beneath our eyes, exploring the countless ways we have devised to depict, define, celebrate, or ridicule it: from Cleopatra’s aquiline nose, exaggerated in representations to emulate those of powerful male rulers, to Michelangelo’s crooked nose, the result of a well-aimed punch and the source of his aesthetic obsession with slender noses; from Federico da Montefeltro’s surgically altered nasal bridge to Napoleon’s prominent nose, and finally to Barbie’s “impossible” nose—still today an ideal attainable only through plastic surgery.
Language: Italian
