James Hall
A Few Pointers
Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence
By Raymond Tallis
Atlantic Books 166pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
The Finger: A Handbook
By Angus Trumble
Yale University Press 256pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
The Romantic cult of the fragment lurks behind the contemporary fashion for books with preposterous possessive titles like Wittgenstein’s Poker, Churchill’s Cigar, Napoleon’s Buttons, Michelangelo’s Nose, Rembrandt’s Nose and Nathaniel’s Nutmeg. Just as the anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) claimed that he could reconstruct an entire animal from a single bone, and the connoisseur Giovanni Morelli (1816–91) believed he could attribute paintings from ‘marginal’ features like ears, hands and fingernails, so our authors insist that a seemingly inconsequential or bathetic detail is in fact the key to a whole personality or historical period.
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