Venus de Willendorf

The Venus de Willendorf is a limestone statuette of the Paléolithique superior preserved at the Museum of natural history of Vienna (Austria).

Description

The statuette is in oolitic Calcaire and measures 11 cm height. It represents a nude woman upright, presenting strong a Obésité, the arms posed on enormous centres. The finely engraved head seems to be entirely covered by rolled up braids, the face is thus hidden. The Loi of frontality is respected.

Remainders of pigments let suppose that originally the statuette was painted in red. The perfection of modelled sound brought a world famous to him.

Archaeological context

She was discovered in 1908 on the site of an old brickyard with Willendorf, small town located close to Krems (Low-Austria). The Stratigraphie recognized at the time of the Fouille S carried out on the site made it possible to allot the statuette to the Gravettien and to allot a relative age to him of approximately 23.000 years before the Christian era. This statuette belongs to the Venus paleolithic, practically always very corpulent and stéatopyges. These features, which one finds in particular at the Venus de Lespugue (Haute-Garonne), made out of ivory, are often interpreted like symbols of fruitfulness. Another figurine, also out of ivory but whose only head reached us, seems to make exception by its smoothness: it is about the Dame of Brassempouy discovered in the Landes.

Interpretations and symbolic system

Interpretation is problematic. Various significances were proposed, all delicate to test ^{scientifically,}:

“orientation matrilinéaire” (guardian of the house and the hearth (“guardian of fire”);
symbol of female fruitfulness in connection with the pregnancy and maternity by underlining the female genitals;
representation of “the paleolithic female ideal”.

Today

Venus de Willendorf became an icon and is used as logo for the movements of claim of the roundness which developed since about thirty years.