The loneliest Jewish day for aesthetes
The upcoming festival of lights, Chanukah, celebrates the destruction of “idols” in unsettling ways.
But for her headless and armless nature, a marble Aphrodite on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art posing hipshot would fit in among the other miens on social media. The beautiful object, of the “Tiepolo Aphrodite” type, is between 2,221- and 2,122-years-old—perhaps overlapping with the reign (175-164 B.C.E.) of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the Seleucid r…