The photo of an observer mesmerised by Hamilton’s magnified maximus takes the history of human-gazing full circle. The earliest work of figurative art that survives, the so-called Venus of the Hohle Fels (discovered in Germany in 2008 and believed to be up to 40,000 years old), reveals just how hard-wired we are, as a species, to embellish the proportions of the bottom. Forged in ivory from mammoth tusk, the teensy statuette is a rugged clump of morbidly bulging breasts and bloated buttocks – exaggerations scholars speculate may relate to its function as a fertility totem. Since then, the derrière has proved a touchstone of visual genius for every image-maker from Hieronymus Bosch (who inscribed one with musical notes) to Salvador Dalí (who tugged William Tell’s into a grotesque tuber) and from Jean-Léon Gérôme (who imagined one magically melting from stony sculpture into peachy flesh) to Kim Kardashian’s cyberspace-destroying selfies. The bottom line? When it comes to art from prehistory to the present, “we don’t want none”, as Nicky Minaj insists, “unless it got buns, hun”.

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