The Venus of Willendorf

28/3/2016 The Venus of Willendorf
The Venus of Willendorf
Christopher L. C. E. Witcombe
1. DISCOVERY
T he most
famous early
image of a
human, a woman, is
the socalled
"Venus" of
Willendorf, found in
1908 by the
archaeologist Josef
Szombathy [see
BIBLIOGRAPHY] in
an Aurignacian
loess deposit in a
terrace about 30
VENUS OF WILLENDORF
meters above the c. 24,00022,000 BCE

Danube river near Oolitic limestone, 4 3/8" (11.1
cm) high
the town of (Naturhistorisches Museum,
Vienna)
Willendorf in
Austria.
The earliest notice of its discovery

appeared in a report by the Yale
anthropologist George Grant MacCurdy
(18631947) who happened to be in
Vienna in the summer of 1908. Although
the greater part of the collection of finds
from the site had not yet been unpacked,
MacCurdy reported excitedly that before
he left Vienna Szombathy had very kindly
shown him a single remarkable specimen
a human figurine, full length, carved out of
stone [see BIBLIOGRAPHY].
The statuette, which measures about

11.1 centimeters in length, is now in
Vienna's Naturhistorisches Museum. It
was carved from a fine porous oolitic
limestone not found in the region and so
must have been brought to the area from
another location. It may well be the case
that the carving, which was presumably
done with flint tools, was not done locally.
When first discovered the Venus of

Willendorf was thought to date to
approximately 15,000 to 10,000 BCE, or
more or less to the same period as the
cave paintings at Lascaux in France. In
http://72.52.202.216/~fenderse/Venus.htm 1/19
the 1970s the date was revised back to

25,00020,000 BCE, and then in the 1980s
it was revised again to c. 30,00025,000
BCE. A study published in 1990 of the
stratigraphic sequence of the nine
superimposed archaeological layers
comprising the Willendorf deposit,
however, now indicates a date for the
Venus of Willendorf of around 24,000
22,000 BCE.
Her great age and pronounced female

forms quickly established the Venus of
Willendorf as an icon of prehistoric art.
She was soon included in introductory art
history textbooks where she quickly
displaced other previously used examples
of Paleolithic art. Being both female and
nude, she fitted perfectly into the
patriarchal construction of the history of
art. As the earliest known representation,
she became the "first woman," acquiring a
sort of UrEve identity that focused
suitably, from a patriarchal point of view,
on the fascinating reality of the female
body.
2. WHAT'S IN A NAME?
When first discovered, the statuette

was identified as "Venus." Szombathy
refers to her as the "Venus of Willendorf"
in an article published in 1909 [see
BIBLIOGRAPHY]. A year or so later,
MacCurdy refers to her as the "socalled
Venus of Willendorf" in Smithsonian
Report for 1909 (published in 1911) [see
BIBLIOGRAPHY].
The name "Venus" had first been used,
in a tone of mocking irony, in 1864 by the
Marquis Paul de Vibraye who described a
headless, armless, footless ivory statuette
he discovered at LaugerieBasse in the
Vèzère valley in the Dordogne as a
"Vénus impudique" or "immodest Venus"
(now in the Musée de l'Homme, Paris).
The Marquis, of course, was playfully

reversing the appellation of "Venus pudica"
("modest Venus") that is used to describe
a statue type of the Classical Venus which
shows, in the Capitoline Venus for
example, the goddess attempting to
conceal her breasts and pubic area from
view. The inference the Marquis makes is
that this prehistoric Venus makes no

attempt to hide her sexuality.
The name "Venus" was subsequently

adopted by Édouard Piette (18271906)
[see BIBLIOGRAPHY], who used it to
describe an ivory figurine, of which only
the corpulent torso survives, found in 1892
in the "Grotte du Pape" at Brassempouy in
the Department of Les Landes and now in
the Musée St. GermainenLaye.
She was originally nicknamed la poire
"the pear" on account of her shape. For
Piette, the name "Venus" may have come
to mind in this particular instance because
of the emphatic treatment of the vulva's
labia and the prominent, slightly protruding
pubic area, which he tastefully refers to as
"le mont de Vénus" the mound of Venus
(or mons pubis). "Venus" has since
become the collective term used to identify
all obese Palaeolithic statuettes of women.
The ironic identification of these

figurines as "Venus" pleasantly satisfied
certain assumptions at the time about the
primitive, about women, and about taste.
Venus, of course, was the Classical
goddess of sexual love and beauty.
Known to the Greeks as Aphrodite,

statues of her nude proliferated in the
Mediterranean world from the 4th century
BCE on, beginning with that carved by
Praxiteles for the sanctuary on the Island
of Knidos.
From the Praxiteles model there

developed a type of freestanding female
nude that came to be known as the "Venus
pudica" or "modest Venus," mentioned
above, whose pose shows the goddess
attempting to conceal her breasts and
pubic area from view.
Two wellknown examples of this type

are the Capitoline Venus (in the Museo
Capitolino in Rome), and the Medici Venus
(in the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence)
In the 15th century, the Italian

Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli
revived this same pose in his painting The
Birth of Venus and initiated a renewed
interest in the Classical Venus.
Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus, c. 148486 (Uffizi
Gallery, Florence)
So familiar is she in the west, that the

name Venus instantly conjures in the mind
an image of a tall, erotically curvaceous,
nude young woman whose primary
identity, as every heterosexual male
recognizes, resides in her physical and
sexual body.
The Classical and Renaissance

Venus's physicality and sexuality, though,
are treated with a high degree of civilized
restraint. In comparison with the "Venus"
of Willendorf, the breasts of the Classical
Venus are small, her pubic area is
undefined (no indication of the vulva, no
definition of the labia), and her stomach,
hips, and buttocks are given no particular
emphasis.
In other words, she exhibits a tasteful,

civilized response to female sexuality that
involves both the display but also the
suppression of its more physical aspects.
The beginning of "history" the shift

from the prehistoric to the historic, a step
marked by the advent of writing also
marks for some the move from the
primitive to the civilized. The Willendorf
figurine nicely illustrates the contrast. Her
bulging, bulbous body, large breasts,
ample abdomen, and vulva slit manifest
unrefined, uncivilized, "primitive" taste.
She also exhibits, in ways that are at

once appealing (to most women, perhaps)
and threatening (to most men, perhaps), a
physical and sexual self that seems

unrestrained, unfettered by cultural taboos
and social conventions. She is an image of
"natural" femaleness, of uninhibited female
power, which "civilization," in the figure of
the Classical Venus, later sought to curtail
and bring under control.
To identify the Willendorf figurine as

"Venus," then, was a rich, male joke that
neatly linked the primitive and the female
with the uncivilized and at the same time,
through implicit contrast with the Classical
Venus, served as a reassuring example to
the patriarchal culture of the extent to
which the female and female sexuality had
been overcome and women effectively
subjugated by the maledominated
civilizing process.
By naming her "Venus," a set of

associations is brought to the image that
influences our response to what we see. In
one respect, she becomes a negative
image, a "failed Venus" who, by the
standards of the Classical Venus, is not
beautiful and is not sexually attractive.
The name "Venus" also encourages us
to judge her as a piece of sculpture
against the standards of idealized Greek,
Roman, and Renaissance art, where she
again fails miserably.
There is also a sex/gender conflict;

between female and feminine. From a
patriarchal western culture point of view,
the Classical Venus is both sexually
female and also feminine in terms of
gender. According to current theory, while
sex is biological, the product of nature,
gender is to be understood as social, the
product of nurture or culture.
The nurture and culture paradigm that

has been defining the feminine in the west
since the Greeks is a patriarchal one. The
feminine, in terms of gender identification,
as it has come to be identified in western
culture, is arguably partially, or even
wholly, a male construction.
The "Venus" of Willendorf is visibly

biologically female, but she is not
feminine; the name "Venus" imposes upon
her a gendered femininity that she does
not have, so again she fails.
3. WOMAN FROM
WILLENDORF
Nowadays, in the captions to

illustrations of her in books, the word
"Woman" is sometimes substituted for
"Venus," a switch that has contributed,
together with the current growing
sensitivity to the visual representation of
women, to a shift in how she is perceived.
One effect of this name change is to

remove her from immediate identification
as a goddess and to think of her in more
mundane, human terms. This
demystification allows us to approach the
figure more on its own terms and, without
the encumbering preconceptions provoked
by a name, gives us a better chance of
interpreting its meaning.

The sculpture shows a woman with a

large stomach that overhangs but does not
hide her pubic area. A roll of fat extends
around her middle, joining with large but
rather flat buttocks. She is not, as Luce
Passemard has pointed out, steatopygous
(that is, possessing protruding buttocks)
[see BIBLIOGRAPHY]. Piette had been
the first to use the term steatopygous to
describe the "Venus" figurines, regarding it
as a racial feature that he related to the
appearance of women in African tribes
such as the Bushmen, Pygmies and

Hottentots (KhoiKhoi) [see
BIBLIOGRAPHY]. The implication that
Aurignacian people may have been
African in appearance influenced
subsequent interpretations.
Her thighs are also large and pressed

together down to the knees. Her forearms,
however, are thin, and are shown draped
over and holding, with cursorily indicated
fingers, the upper part of her large breasts.
Small markings on her wrists seem to
indicate the presence of bracelets. Her
breasts are full and appear soft, but they
are not sagging and pendulous. The
nipples are not indicated.
Her genital area would appear to have
been deliberately emphasized with the
labia of the vulva carefully detailed and
made clearly visible, perhaps unnaturally
so, and as if she had no pubic hair. This,
combined with her large breasts and the
roundness of her stomach, suggests that
the "subject" of the sculpture is female
procreativity and nurture and the piece has
long been identified as some sort of fertility
idol.
A characteristic of all the Paleolithic

"Venus" figurines exhibited by the
Willendorf statuette is the lack of a face,
which for some, arguing that the face is a
key feature in human identity, means that
she is to be regarded as an anonymous
sexual object rather than a person; it is her
physical body and what it represents that
is important.
From the front, the place where her

face should be seems to be largely
concealed by what are generally described
as rows of plaited hair wrapped around her
head.
Close examination,
however, reveals that
the rows are not one
continuous spiral but
are, in fact, composed
in seven concentric
horizontal bands that
encircle the head, with
two more halfbands below at the back of
her neck. The topmost circle has the form
of a rosette. The bands vary in width from
front to back to sides, and also vary in size
from each other. Cut across the groove
separating each band at regular, closely
spaced intervals is a series of more or less
lozengeshaped deep vertical notches,
some wide, others narrow, that extend
equally into the band above and into the
band below. These notches alternate
between bands to produce the effect of
braided or plaited hair. That it is intended
to be understood as braided hair seems
clear, although it has been suggested
recently that the figure is in fact wearing a
fiberbased woven hat or cap [see
BIBLIOGRAPHY].
When seen in
profile, the
impression is that
the figure is
looking down with
her chin sunk to
her chest, and her
hair looks more
like hair; longer at back and falling and
gathering like real hair might on her upper
back. Some find it significant that the
number of full circles is seven; many
thousands of years later seven was
regarded as a magic number.
Such elaborate treatment of hair is

extremely rare in Paleolithic figurines, and
the considerable attention paid to it by the
sculptor must mean it had some
significance. In later cultures, hair has
been considered a source of strength, and
as the seat of the soul.
Hair also has a long history as a

source of erotic attraction that lies,
perhaps surprisingly, not so much in its
color, style, or length, but in its odor. The
erotic attraction of the odor of hair is
obviously rooted in the sense of smell,
which plays a considerable role in sexual
relations. Though greatly diminished in the
modern world, smell was paramount in
establishing an erotic rapport with a mate,
as it still is among animals. In this context,
the hair of the woman or goddess
represented in the "Venus" of Willendorf
figurine may have been regarded as
erotically charged as her breasts and
pubic area.
Another characteristic of Paleolithic

"Venus" figurines is the lack of feet. In the
archaeological report of her finding, the
Willendorf statuette is described as
perfectly preserved in all its parts, so it
appears she never had feet.
It has been suggested that possibly the
intention was to curtail the figurine's power
to leave wherever she had been placed.
A more common explanation is that

because the statuette served as a fertility
idol, the sculptor included only those parts
of the female body needed for the
conception and nurture of children. Even if
she had feet, though, it seems unlikely that
she was meant to stand up. This is even
more true of the other Paleolithic figurines.
Nor it seems was she

ever intended to lie in a
supine position. In fact, her
most satisfactory, and most
satisfying, position is being
held in the palm of the
hand. When seen under
these conditions, she is
utterly transformed as a piece of sculpture.
As fingers are imagined gripping her
rounded adipose masses, she becomes a
remarkably sensuous object, her flesh
seemingly soft and yielding to the touch.
What her identity and purpose may

have been, why and for what reason she
was carved, becomes an even more
pressing question. If we dismiss all
associations with goddesses and fertility
figures, and assume an objective
response to what we see, she might be
identified as simply a StoneAge doll for a
child.
But this strikes us as unsatisfactory, not
the least because of the very high degree
of artistic ability exhibited in the sculpting
of her forms. Compared with the other
Paleolithic figurines in this group, the
"Venus" of Willendorf is a remarkably
realistic representation of a fat woman.
4. WOMEN IN THE STONE AGE
And she does appear to be fat rather

than pregnant; a condition, it has been
suggested, due to eating large quantities
of fat and marrow, and a sedentary life.
Whatever it was

she was eating that
caused her to become
so fat, the suggestion
that she must have led
a life of relative leisure
in order to gain so
much weight offers a
clue to her status. The
question is: Is this
what women in the Stone Age looked like?
Or did they look more like Raquel Welch in
the 1960s movie "One Million Years B.C."?
If what the archaeologists tell us is

true, that Stone Age societies survived
through hunting and gathering, the
chances are the women looked more like
Ms. Welch than Ms. Willendorf whose
obesity would have greatly impaired her
ability to move around foraging and
gathering.
The chances are, a Stone Age woman,
much like the women in huntergatherer
tribes today (such as the !Kung of the
Kalahari Desert in South Africa), would not
have had the opportunity to get that fat,
unless, of course, she had some special
status. She evidently did not need to
gather, or hunt, but must have been
catered to and had her needs met by
others.
Significantly, none of the few Paleolithic
male figures in sculpture or in engraved
images is shown corpulent. If the woman
of Willendorf was a special female, who
might she have been?
The lifelike treatment of both the

overall form of a fat woman and such
details as the figure's knees and the
dimples where the upper arm meets the
chest, has caused at least one writer to
suggest that a real women served as the
sculptor's model.
If this were in fact the case, that the

"Venus" of Willendorf is not an idol or a
goddess but an actual woman, then she
was clearly a woman whose specialness is
indicated by her obesity and also by the
fact that someone, a man or a woman,
went to great pains to produce a likeness
of her. But the likeness, if such it is, is

noticed only in the torso and perhaps in
her hairstyle; otherwise she has no face,
unnaturally thin arms, and no feet.
The fact that numerous examples of

this type of female figure, all generally
exhibiting the same essential
characteristics large stomachs and
breasts, featureless faces, miniscule or
missing feet have been found over a
broad geographical area ranging from
France to Siberia, suggests that some
system of shared understanding and
perception of a particular type of woman
existed during the Paleolithic.
Images of women, mostly figurines of

the same type as the "Venus" of
Willendorf, all dating to the Paleolithic
period, far outnumber images of men. This
has lead to speculation about the place of
women in Stone Age society.
Some have argued that these female

figures denote the existence during this
period of a prominent female deity
identified usually as the Earth Mother or
the Mother Goddess. On the basis of this
assumption, it has been suggested that,
unlike today, women played a considerably
more important, if not dominant, role in
Paleolithic society; that possibly a
matriarchy existed and women ruled.
The "Venus" of Willendorf may be a

representation at once of the Mother
Goddess and a special living woman; one
represented in the form or guise of the
other, although which came first is
impossible to know. Lacking written
documentation, such claims are difficult to
support or refute.
5. EARTH MOTHER MOTHER
GODDESS
The concept of an Earth Mother or

Mother Goddess or Great Goddess
derives primarily from the Greeks. In the
Theogony, written in the early 7th century
BCE, the poet Hesiod named the "deep
breasted" Earth Gaea, "a firm seat of all
things for ever," who, after emerging out of
Chaos, brought forth "starry Ouranus" (the
sky), Mountains, the sea, and, after having
lain with Ouranus, a number of non
cosmological Titans.
Plato (c. 427347 BCE) in the Timaeus
(40e) calls her Ge. According to
Pausanias in his Description of Greece
(2nd century CE), there was an altar and
sanctuary dedicated to Gaia (the Gaeum)
at Olympia (V.14.10), and another, known
as the Gaeus, near Aegae in Achaia
(VII.25.13). There was also a sanctuary of
Earth the NursingMother near the
entrance to the Acropolis in Athens
(I.22.3).
The Romans worshipped her as Tellus,
or Terra Mater, whom Varro (11627 BCE)
called "the Great Mother."
Tellus or Terra Mater (detail from the Ara Pacis
Augustae, Rome)
image source
In De rerum natura, the Latin poet

Lucretius (died c. 55 BCE) calls the earth
Tellus and refers several times to her as
Mother Earth or the Great Mother, stating
that "she alone is called Great Mother of
the gods [Magna deum Mater], and Mother
of the wild beasts, and maker of our
bodies" (II.597599).
The cult of the Great Mother [Magna

Mater], later identified with the mother
goddess Cybele (and by the Greeks as
Rhea), was established in Rome by the
3rd century BCE. The Greek satirist
Lucian (120c.190 CE) mentions the
"Great Mother" in his dialogue Saturnalia
(12).
A measure of her prominence in the

pagan world is the space St. Augustine
(354430 CE) devotes to attacking her
worship in The City of God Against the
Pagans (VII, 24).
Largely suppressed during the

Christian period, she emerges again in the
18th century when references are made to
the female Earth as Mother Goddess.
Interest in the Earth Mother and the

Great Mother increased significantly in the
19th century. Besides the classical
sources attesting to her worship, the 19th
century became aware of the many
contemporary tribal peoples who
worshipped the Earth as a female deity.
In 1861, in the first volume of his book
Das Mutterrecht ['The Mother Right'] [see
BIBLIOGRAPHY] the Swiss anthropologist
Johann Jacob Bachofen (18151887)
argued that the matriarchate or
gynecocracy found among tribal peoples,
where authority in both the family and the
tribe was in the hands of the women, was
to be associated with the worship of a
supreme female earth deity.
When these ideas became meshed

with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution,
laid out in 1859 in his On the Origin of
Species, there emerged the view that
human evolution must have passed
through an earlier matriarchal stage.
Though controversial, this view posed

no serious threat to patriarchal order.
Indeed, in the context of arguments
developed by the social Darwinists in the
later 19th and early 20th centuries, it
nicely demonstrated the superiority and
evolutionary "fitness" of patriarchy over
matriarchy. The fact that matriarchy was to
be found in the contemporary world only
among "primitive" tribal peoples only
served to substantiate this claim.
It was against this background of ideas
that archaeologists working at the end of
the 19th century and the beginning of the
20th century saw the newly discovered
Paleolithic "Venus" figurines, and which
permitted an interpretation of them as
representations of the Mother Goddess.
Despite the lack of evidence, beyond

the appearance of the figurines
themselves, ancient Greek cosmogonies,
and the spurious connection with much
later tribal practices, numerous scholars
have nonetheless felt free to extend the
idea of an Earth Goddess or Mother
Goddess into the prehistoric past and to
claim that StoneAge peoples had
believed in her as a universal deity.
Other scholars, however, have rejected
these ideas as a basis for interpretation
and have pointed out, for example, the
lack of obvious signs of divinity in the
figurines. But, again, lacking written
documentation these claims either way are
difficult to support or refute.
Although the paradigm of the "Venus"

of Willendorf as Mother Goddess persists,
in recent years the figurine has also been
interpreted as possibly functioning in a
more gynaecological context, perhaps
serving as a charm or amulet of some kind
for women in connection with fertility.
At the time of its discovery, the

statuette showed traces of red ochre
pigment, which has been thought to
symbolize, or serve as a surrogate of, the
menstrual blood of women as a lifegiving
agent, as is the case in later traditions.
The emphasis given to the "Venus" of

Willendorf's vulva and the possibility that
the red ochre served as a blood substitute
suggest that the figurine may have served
some purpose in connection with female
menstruation.
If the "Venus" of Willendorf was made

to function within this sort of context, it
would place the figurine emphatically
within the sphere of the female. This would
increase the possibility that it was carved
not by a man, but by a woman.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
1. Johann Jacob Bachofen
Das Mutterrecht. Eine untersuchung
uber die gynaikokratie der alten welt
nach ihrer religiosen und rechtlichen
natur. vol. I (Stuttgart: Krais &
Hoffmann, 1861; reprint Basel: B.

Schwabe, 1948)
2. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford
The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution
of an Image (London: Penguin,
1993; first published by Viking, 1991)
3. Kenneth Clark
The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form.
The A. W. Mellon Mellon Lectures in
the Fine Arts, 1953. The National
Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
(Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1956)
4. Claudine Cohen
La Femme des origines: Images de
la femme dans la préhistoire
occidentale (Paris: Hescher, 2003)
5. Elisabeth Saccasyn Della Santa
Les Figures Humaines du
Paléolithique Supérieur Eurasiatique
(Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1947)
6. Henri Delporte
L'Image de la Femme dans l'Art
Préhistorique (Paris: Picard, 1993)
7. MarciaAnne Dobres
"Venus Figurines," in The Oxford
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by Brian M. Fagan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996), 740741
8. JeanPierre Duhard
"Upper Palaeolithic Figures as a
Reflection of Human Morphology
and Social Organization," Antiquity
67 (1993), 8390
Réalisme de l'image féminine
paléolithique (Paris: Centre national
de la recherche scientifique, 1993)
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paléolithique (Grenoble: J. Millon,
1996)
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"Der Herkunft der Venus I von
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(1950), 114145
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"Les objets d'art paléolithique en
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(Bulletin de la Société Préhistorique
de l'Ariège) 27 (1972), 7381
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Women in Prehistory (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1989)
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The Eternal Present: The Beginnings
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(London: Oxford University Press,
1962)
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"The "Monstrous Venus" of
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(1981), 126
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Palaeolithic Art (New York: McGraw
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(19391940), 85156
18. J. R. Harding
"Certain Upper Palaeolithic 'Venus'
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the Pathological Condition Known as
Massive Hypertrophy of the Breasts,"
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The Aphrodite of Knidos and Her
Successors: A Historical Review of
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1995)
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Blood Relations: Menstruation and
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1991)
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The Art of Prehistoric Man in
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227275
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60 (1990), 219228
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Les Statuettes Féminines
Paléolithiques dites Vénus
Stéatopyges (Nîmes: Teissier, 1938)
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The Creative Explosion: An Inquiry
into the Origins of Art and Religion
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28/3/2016 The Venus of Willendorf

The earliest notice of its discovery

The statuette, which measures about

When first discovered the Venus of

the 1970s the date was revised back to

Her great age and pronounced female

When first discovered, the statuette

The Marquis, of course, was playfully

that this prehistoric Venus makes no

The name "Venus" was subsequently

The ironic identification of these

Known to the Greeks as Aphrodite,

From the Praxiteles model there

Two well­known examples of this type

In the 15th century, the Italian

So familiar is she in the west, that the

The Classical and Renaissance

In other words, she exhibits a tasteful,

The beginning of "history" ­ the shift

She also exhibits, in ways that are at

physical and sexual self that seems

To identify the Willendorf figurine as

By naming her "Venus," a set of

There is also a sex/gender conflict;

The nurture and culture paradigm that

The "Venus" of Willendorf is visibly

Nowadays, in the captions to

One effect of this name change is to

The sculpture shows a woman with a

such as the Bushmen, Pygmies and

Her thighs are also large and pressed

A characteristic of all the Paleolithic

From the front, the place where her

Such elaborate treatment of hair is

Hair also has a long history as a

Another characteristic of Paleolithic

A more common explanation is that

Nor it seems was she

What her identity and purpose may

And she does appear to be fat rather

Whatever it was

If what the archaeologists tell us is

The life­like treatment of both the

If this were in fact the case, that the

of her. But the likeness, if such it is, is

The fact that numerous examples of

Images of women, mostly figurines of

Some have argued that these female

The "Venus" of Willendorf may be a

The concept of an Earth Mother or

In De rerum natura, the Latin poet

The cult of the Great Mother [Magna

A measure of her prominence in the

Largely suppressed during the

Interest in the Earth Mother and the

When these ideas became meshed

Though controversial, this view posed

Despite the lack of evidence, beyond

Although the paradigm of the "Venus"

At the time of its discovery, the

The emphasis given to the "Venus" of

If the "Venus" of Willendorf was made

Hoffmann, 1861; reprint Basel: B.

Two wellknown examples of this type

The beginning of "history" the shift

The lifelike treatment of both the