Professor Butter Beard and Praxiteles’ “Aphrodite of Knidos”
“It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.”
― Raymond Chandler, “Farewell, My Lovely”
I have a soft spot for gingers…… But one cannot ignore the beguiling and bewitching beauty of the blondes. Look at the year Barbie and Ken are enjoying! Youngsters all over the planet continue to flip back their Elsa platinum braid before belting out their “Let It Go” anthem. All Twiggy has to do is bat her mile-long lashes and shake her cropped blonde locks and I am immediately transported back into the “swingin’ sixties.” And, yes, I still twitch my nose like Elizabeth Montgomery and long to live within the realm of Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel.
But, for me, there is one true blonde queen: Aphrodite - the gorgeous Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, desire and fertility. It is written within the “Homeric Hymes” (a collection of thirty-three anonymous ancient Greek hymns “Homeric” in the sense that they employ the same epic meter as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey), “Muse, tell me the things done by golden Aphrodite, the one from Cyprus, who arouses sweet desire for gods and who subdues the populations of mortal humans, and birds as well, who fly in the sky, as well as all beasts, all those that grow on both dry land and the sea.”
Both modern and ancient historians agree that one of the most famous and most visited sculptures of the ancient world was the “Aphrodite of Knidos,” sculpted by the masterful Praxiteles in 360 BCE. According to Pliny the Elder (writing in the 1st century CE), Praxiteles sculpted both a nude and a clothed version of Aphrodite. The Greek island-city of Kos chose to purchase the second because they considered the goddess without clothes too indecent and did not morally represent their city, while the cape-city of Knidos whole-heartedly welcomed the more suggestive sculpture. Pliny states that the statue granted instant fame to Knidos, a fact that seems to be confirmed by the issuance at the time of coins in which the statue was represented.
Praxiteles is believed to have modeled Aphrodite after his mistress Phryne, who was said to have been the most beautiful courtesans in all of ancient Greece. She had long, flowing blonde hair, and was the star attraction at the festival of Poseidon in which she emerged from the sea god’s temple, disrobed, and waded into the ocean to offer a sacrifice. This dreamscape easily translates in my mind into Botticelli’s blonde “Venus” (the Roman Aphrodite) as she is born from the sea and elegantly arrives riding on a giant scallop shell.
We find a contemporary description of the work of art within the “Dialogue Amores,” traditionally (and to many, mistakenly) attributed to Lucian of Samósata writing in the 2nd century CE:
“When we exhausted the charms of these places we entered the temple. In the center of it is the goddess, a beautiful statue made of Paros marble with her lips slightly separated by a haughty smile. Without clothes to cover her, all her beauty is uncovered and exposed, except to the extent that she discreetly uses a hand to hide her private parts. The skill of the sculptor has been so successful that it seems that the marble has lost its hardness to mold the grace of its extremities.”
According to the story written within the “Amores,” Lucian sails to Knidos, which he calls “the city of Aphrodite” with two friends, one a Corinthian heterosexual man and the other an Athenian homosexual man. They travel throughout the city and arrive at the temple of Aphrodite. When they find themselves in front of the statue and observe that the figure is totally “uncovered” except in its erogenous zones, Lucian’s heterosexual friend becomes aroused and quickly kisses the statue's lips.
After observing a stain on Aphrodite's back and not knowing what it meant, the trio ask the priestess in charge for an explanation. She shares a story about a young man on holiday who fell desperately in love with the sculpture and locked himself up in the temple one night. The ruinous stain was the young man's attempt to privately consummate his passion. Upon being discovered, he was so embarrassed that he threw himself off a cliff near the edge of the temple.
Unfortunately, the original sculpture has been lost, thought to have been consumed by fire. To date, some 200 representations of the figure are known, including more or less fragmented copies: statuettes of marble, bronze, silver, glass and terracotta, coins and reliefs, all reproductions of the best documented statue of Praxiteles’ work. The “Colonna Venus” is a Roman marble copy, conserved in the Museo Pio-Clementino as a part of the Vatican Museums’ collections. It is currently acknowledged as the best-known and perhaps most faithful Roman copy of Praxiteles's original masterpiece.
In honor of all this beguiling and bewitching blond beauty, may I present my latest version of the “Blondie” - a cakier and more vanilla version of a decadent chocolate brownie. Baked in much the same fashion as its chocolate cousin, this blondie dances with roasted pistachios, flirtatious crystallized ginger and sweet white chocolate. It’s true that blondes may have more fun, but don’t discount us gingers. We make dreams come true.
Crystallized Ginger and Salted Pistachio Blondies
Sixteen Blondies
8 ounces unsalted butter (2 sticks)
1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour
½ tsp fine sea salt
2 tsps Chinese Five Spice powder
3 large eggs, room temperature
1 ¼ cup granulated sugar
1 tsp vanilla paste
¾ cup toasted and salted pistachios (unshelled)
1 cup white chocolate chips (divided in to ½ for batter and ½ cup for decoration)
½ cup crystallized ginger, chopped into a fine dice (save 2 Tbsp to sprinkle over baked blondies)
1) Heat your oven to 350 degrees and line a 7” by 11” baking pan with parchment paper.
2) Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat or in the microwave. Set aside to cool slightly.
3) In a small bowl, whisk together the flour, salt and Chinese Five-Spice.
4) In a standing mixer with the whisk attachment, whisk the eggs and sugar on medium high until they are doubled in size and creating a ribbon on the surface.
5) Turn the mixer to low and slowly pour in the melted butter and then add the vanilla paste.
6) Remove the mixing bowl from the mixer and gently fold in the dry mix and then the additions: the pistachios, ½ of the white chocolate chips and most of the finely diced crystallized ginger (saving 2 Tbsp for decoration).
7) Turn the batter into the baking pan and even the top with a spatula. Bake the blondie for roughly 25 minutes until just cooked through and starting to brown.
8) Remove the baking pan from the oven and place it on a wire rack to cool. Sprinkle the remaining crystallized ginger on the top of the blondies while still hot.
9) While the blondies cool, melt the remaining white chocolate chips using either a double boiler or the microwave (10 second zaps – stirring between zaps). When the blondies are cool to the touch, drizzle the white chocolate over as desired.
10) Cut the blondies into 16 squares and serve.
