Nude woman (Venus of Willendorf)

Limestone

ca. 28,000-25,000 BCE

*Found in Austria. breasts, stomach, pubic area was emphasized. More of a depiction rather than portrait. Prehistoric ideal woman -In the earliest art, humankind consists almost exclusively of women as opposed to men, and the painters andsculptors almost invariably showed them nude, although scholars generally assume that during the Ice Age both women and men wore garments covering parts of their bodies.  When archaeologists first discovered Paleolithic statuettes of women, they dubbed them “Venuses” after the Greco-Roman goddess of beauty and love, whom artists usually depicted nude. The nickname is inappropriate and misleading. It is doubtful that the Old Stone Age figurines represented deities of any kind.  One of the oldest and the most famous of the prehistoric female firgures is the tiny limestone figurine of a woman that long has been known as the Venus of Willendorf after its find spot in Austria. Its cluster of almost ball-like shapes is unusual, the result in part of the sculptor’s response to the natural shape of the stone selected for carving. The anatomical exaggeration has suggested to many that this and similar statuettes served as fertility images. But other Paleolithic stone women of far more slender proportions exists, and the meaning of these images is as elusive as everything else about the Paleolithic art. Yet the preponderance of female over male figures in the Old Stone Age seems to indicate a preoccupation with women, whose child-bearing capabilities ensured the survival of the species.  The sculptor did not aim for naturalism in shape and proportion. As with most Paleolithic figures, the sculptor did not carve any facial features. Here there carver suggested only a mass of curly hair or, as some researchers have recently argued, a hat woven from plant fibers-evidence for the art of textile manufacture at a very early date. The breast of the Willendorf women are enormous, far larger than the tiny forearms and hands that rest upon them. The carver also took pains to scratch into the stone the outline of the pubic triangle.  Sculptors often omitted this detail in other early figurines, leading some scholars to question the nature of these figures as fertility images. Whatever the purpose of these statuettes, the makers intent seems to have been to represent not a specific woman but the female form.