Professor Butter Beard and Raphael’s “Lady with a Unicorn”
“Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.” – Laini Taylor, “Daughter of Smoke & Bone”
Welcome back, gentle reader! (Yup, Bridgerton too will be back in just a matter of weeks!) But as for Professor Butter Beard, it has been a stormy winter journey to return to your art history and baking reading lists and to reignite my own “hope and magic.” A late autumnal leg and hip injury interrupted my “regularly scheduled program” in dark and painful ways, but with the incredible encouragement of Nellie, dear friends and amazing physicians and therapists, I have retaught my soul and body to “know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you.” And I am extremely grateful.
My mentor highly suggested I search and identify “carrots at the end of the string” as a means of striving forward towards full recovery. One of the most powerful was the vision of confidently walking and conversing again soon with my favorite works of art not only the Metropolitan Museum, but also in the Uffizi, the Louvre and the Rijksmuseum.
The day after I identified that goal and wrote it in my Van Gogh notebook, I receive a holiday card in the mail from Max Hollein announcing the Met’s monumental spring exhibition, “Raphael: Sublime Poetry.” Magic, my friends. Magic.
“Raphael: Sublime Poetry,” writes Mr. Hollein, “is the first comprehensive exhibition on Raphael in the United States, bringing together more than two hundred of the artist’s greatest masterpieces and rarely seen treasures to illuminate the brilliance of Raphael’s extraordinary creativity. The son of a painter and poet, Raphael engaged with the foremost writers and thinkers of his age in Rome, displaying a poetic sensibility that captivated his peers and generations that followed. Follow the full breadth of his life and career, from his origins in Urbino to his rise in Florence, where he began to emerge as a peer of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, to his final, prolific decade at the papal court in Rome.”
And on the cover of Mr. Hollein’s “personal note” was one of my favorite of Raphael’s artistic poems: “Portrait of a Lady with a Unicorn.”
Unlike his elder contemporaries Michelangelo and Leonardo, Raphael was not from Florence. He was born in Urbino in 1483 and grew up in the sophisticated humanist environment of the court of Federico da Montefeltro. He arrived in Florence in late 1504 and stayed, intermittently, until about 1508, working predominantly on versions of the Virgin and Child for private devotion.
“His impulse to learn,” writes Scott Nethersole, a prominent Rapheal historian, “is born out of his drawings from this period.” The collected drawings include copies of Michelangelo’s “David,” Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” and Leonardo’s now-lost “Leda and the Swan.” These incredible studies are perfect examples of one generation learning from another.
The composition of the Raphael’s “Lady with a Unicorn,” placing the figure in a loggia opening out onto a landscape, the three-quarter length format, is currently thought to be inspired by the “Mona Lisa,” painted by Leonardo between 1503 and 1506. Raphael’s “Lady” was also painted between 1505 and 1506. However, Dr. Christof Thoenes, Honorary Professor in Hamburg, writes: “However unabashedly Raphael adopts the pose, compositional framework and spatial organization of the Leonardo portrait...the cool watchfulness in the young woman's gaze is very different from the “enigmatic ambiguity” of the “Mona Lisa.”
“Lady” was originally oil on panel and was transferred to canvas during intense conservation work in 1934. It was in the course of this cleaning that excessive overpainting was eliminated, revealing an infant unicorn (a symbol of chastity in medieval romance), and removing the wheel, cloak, and palm frond (attributes of Saint Catherine of Alexandria) that had been added by an unknown painter during the mid-17th century.
The 1934 restoration also confirmed art historian Roberto Longhi's attribution of the work to Raphael. Further restoration work on the painting in 1959 revealed through radiography the image of a small dog, a symbol of conjugal fidelity, under the unicorn. It is now thought that the original dog served as a sketch for the final appearance of the unicorn, and today, the ears of the pup are visible as pentimenti on the lady's sleeve.
Hope and magic. An adoring Nellie transformed into an enchanted unicorn made invisible by a saint’s cloak and wheel.
These poems and dreams inspired me to enter my kitchen alongside the first hint of daybreak this morning and positively return to my life of baking (another carrot on the list). Raphael’s pallet of nutmeg and cinnamon always reminds me of snickerdoodles and the gleeful joy they bring. In fact, even saying the word inspired sparkle and giggles from the hopeful youngsters that I visited in my Santa drag during December. May they bring you the same magic and the confidence that “The most powerful weapon is hope!” (Juliet Mariller, “Heart’s Blood”)
Professor Butter Beard’s Favorite Nutmeg Snickerdoodles
5 Dozen Cookies
5 ¼ cup (668 grams) all-purpose flour
2 ¼ tsp cream of tartar
1 ½ tsp baking soda
1 tsp freshly grated nutmeg (plus an additional 2 tsp for rolling)
3 sticks (1 ½ cups) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2 2/3 cup (525 grams) granulated sugar (plus an additional ½ cup for rolling)
1 ½ tsp kosher salt
1 large egg, plus 4 additional yolks
2 tsp vanilla paste
2 tsp caramel extract (optional)
Note – one delicious addition is to whisk some fresh citrus zest with the sugar before creaming with the salt and butter – orange or lemon.
1) In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cream of tartar, baking soda and 1 tsp of freshly grated nutmeg. Set at the ready.
2) In a standing mixer with the paddle attachment, mix together the sugar and salt and then cream with the room-temperature butter until very smooth and fluffy.
3) On low, slowly add the whole egg and additional yolks, beating until fully combined. Add the vanilla paste and caramel extract (if using) and mix again until combined.
4) Add the flour mix and mix on low until just combined. Line a baking sheet with parchment and portion using a medium cookie scoop. Cover with plastic wrap and set aside to fully hydrate (room temperature for ten minutes, or an hour or two in your refrigerator).
5) Preheat your oven to 350 degrees and line three baking sheets with parchment paper.
6) In a medium bowl, whisk together the ½ cup sugar and 2 tsp of freshly grated nutmeg.
7) Roll a dozen cookie dough balls in the sugar mix and place on the baking sheet. Bake for 6 ½ minutes then rotate the pan and bake for an additional 6 minutes until slightly puffed and edges are just beginning to brown. Continue to bake the cookies, one sheet at a time.
8) Let the cookies cool on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing them to a wire rack to finish cooling.
