The Rear View: A Brief and Elegant History of Bottoms through the Ages - Hardcover

A cultural history of the buttocks from antiquity to the present considers the portrayal of the behind in art, literature, and biology, glancing at such figures as Herodotus, de Sade, Edward Hopper, and Robert Mapplethorpe. 20,000 first printing.

red, provocative, and shamelessly enjoyable, The Rear View is a celebration of the behind, ranging from its physical evolution to its history as a source of artistic and literary inspiration and as a barometer of social attitudes.

The ancient Greeks revered the buttocks as being an aspect of the divine and portrayed them enthusiastically on marble statuary. With the Christian era, however, depiction of the nude figure sank into shameful ignominy until the fifteenth century, when Florentine artists once more raised the bottom to subliminal heights, from which lofty eminence it was dashed by the prudish Victorians, who found everything from the waist down a source of embarrassment. Today dress designers decree that the bottom should once more be the focus of attention, and no dedicated followers of fashion can afford to neglect their rear view--or this well-rounded appraisal of it.

Jean-Luc Hennig, a French linguist and essayist, begins the book by writing that "Buttocks