Candice: Welcome to Cracker Croakers for Friday, January 11, 2019. I'm Candice Bergeron, your hostess with the mostest.

Colton: And, I'm your other host Colton Wyatt.

Candice: Today, I thought we'd add a little flair especially for the British segment of our audience, both here and on the other side of the pond.

Colton: What's that, Candice?

Candice: Talk about Mary Beard.

Colton: Mary Beard is Britain's most beloved intellectual. This past summer she was honored by Queen Elizabeth who named her a dame.

Candice: Did you know, Colton, a three-thousand-year-old carbonized piece of cake from ancient Egypt began Mary Beard down the road of loving art when she was five years old?

Colton: The story goes Mary wanted an up close and personal gaze at that piece of cake so the curator of the British Museum opened up the case the prize was located in and placed it right in front of her.

Candice: Just like that piece of cake, Mary Beard has opened up many doors to history in her lengthy tenure as a classics professor at Cambridge.

Colton: Mary Beard has also become a recognized television host, bestselling author, and revisionist.

Candice: Her book SQPR: A History of Ancient Rome is an excellent social commentary. She has also been featured in the BBC series "Civilization".

Colton: Her new book How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization explores the reception and depiction of ancient art in readable prose as well as a cache of accompanying pictures.

Candice: Such treasures as images of the human body, taken from around the world, and pictures of ancient gods, are shared in her book.

Colton: Exotic locations including Angkor Vat in Cambodia, art-filled caves in India, the Olmec colossal heads on the Gulf Coast of Mexico, Chinese terra-cotta warriors, and a mosque in Istanbul, Turkey highlight her book.

Candice: How Do We Look is a plain-spoken and down-to-earth guide filled with a cavalcade of artistic masterpieces.

Colton: In one particular instance, Mary Beard climbs alongside the 65-foot tall Colossi of Memnon statues of Pharaoh Amenhotep III in the Theban Necropolis.

Candice: These stone marvels are located west of the Nile River near Luxor. Later, Mary Beard details how her adventures affected her.

Colton: As Mary explained in a recent interview...

Mary Beard: If I look impressed and a bit moved, it's because I was. It's kind of exciting and slightly terrifying in a way, to be so up close to those things.

Colton: However, unlike many other art historians, Mary Beard does not focus simply on the lives of artists, or their methods of creativity. In that same interview she explaines...

Mary Beard: I think that just as or more interesting is what people made of the art, how they saw it, and what they did with it over the last 2,000 years.

Candice: She cites as an example of what she is talking about the Aphrodite of Knidos in Asia Minor created by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles around 330BC. He was the first artist to sculpt the nude female form in a life-sized statue. Let's allow Mary to explain in this interview we keep quoting from.

Mary Beard: The idea of displaying the naked female body was once really "in your face". Now, nudes have become part of the stereotype of the greatest hits of world art.

Colton: Mary Beard 's unique taste in art is further demonstrated by her preference to see artworks in their original settings such as the unfinished sculpture still found in the quarry in Naxos, Greece. She says...

Mary Beard: This sculpture has been in the world of this village for two and a half thousand years now. You start to see how these things are incorporated into our own lives and the lives of people of the past.

Candice: Mary Beard's book How Do We Look: The Body, the Devine, and the Question of Civilization is published by Liveright Publishers.

Colton: The book, for those who desire to learn more, contains an ISBN of 9781631494406. An audio book, and an eBook version are also available.

Candice: Well, that about wraps us up for this edition of Cracker Croakers.

Colton: In that case, smarty-pants, I suppose we better say adieu. She's Candice!

Candice: And, he's Colton!

Candice and Colton: And, we invite you to join us again Monday for another entertaining edition of Cracker Croakers (Featuring Candice and Colton).