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Venus of WillendorfItalic text '

The Venus of Willendorf is a Palaeolithic Venus dated between 27,500 and 25,000 BC. C.1 It was found in 1908 by the worker Johann Veran or Josef Veran2 3 during excavations directed by the archaeologists Josef Szombathy, Hugo Obermaier and Josef Bayer in a Paleolithic site near Willendorf, on the shore of the Danube. It is currently kept in the Museum of Natural History in Vienna, Austria. The figure comes from the Moravian territory, currently part of the Czech Republic.

Description The figure of this nude woman, about 11 centimeters high, 5.7 wide and 4.5 thick, with 15 centimeters in circumference, was sculpted in paleolithic limestone and tinted with red ocher.

The set respects the law of frontality, although the head appears to "look" slightly towards the right breast. It seems to be a conventional, unrealistic representation, since her abdomen, vulva, buttocks and breasts are extremely voluminous (in the buttocks: steatopygia), from which many studies have deduced a strong relationship with the concept of fertility. The arms, very thin and almost imperceptible, are bent over the breasts. He does not have a visible face, his head being covered with what may be braids, a type of hairstyle or a hood, and leaning forward. The abdomen has a notorious hollow that represents the navel. The bulging pubis spreads over thick thighs. Although the legs are anatomically very accurate, the knees are together and the feet - which have not been represented (or have been lost) - would be separated, whereby the sculpture ends at the ankles.

Archaeological context The Willendorf site is actually a collection of seven Upper Paleolithic occupations, in a loess field in the Danube Valley. The statuette appeared in Settlement II, the stratigraphy of which extends from an Aurignacian base to Pavlovian (a local Magdalenian designation), it is then considered to date from the Gravettian phase.

Layer number 9, the one containing the figurine, yielded a lithic industry composed of bent-edge blades, truncated pieces, and notch points of a type earlier than that found in the Kostienki levels. In 1990, after a revised analysis of the site's stratigraphy, the relative dating was estimated to be between 22,000 and 24,000 years old.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venus_of_Willenford.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Naked_woman,.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Slightly_towards_the_right_breast.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reference_to_fertility,.jpg See also Paleolithic art Mother goddess