Venus figurines

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Venus vom Hohlefels
Venus of Willendorf

As Venus figurines are statuettes called female bodies in archaeological sites of the Upper Paleolithic were found. Today archaeologists mostly prefer the term “ female statuettes ”. These small works of art come predominantly from the younger Gravettia of Eurasia (in Lower Austria and Moravia also called Pavlovia ) or from the middle to younger Magdalenian (in Central and Western Europe). The majority of the figurines are between 28,000 years (24,000 14C years ) and 12,000 years old. The Venus vom Hohlefels and the Venus vom Galgenberg come from the Aurignacia and are at least 35,000 years old. During the late ice age they were spread over the entire then ice-free Europe. In addition to an abundance of engravings in rock and slate - z. B. in Gönnersdorf near Neuwied - we know today over 130 sculptures that u. a. were discovered in Russia (in both European and Siberian and Asian regions), Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Italy, Germany and France. As a rule, they are interpreted on the one hand as symbols of fertility , on the other hand as a representation of a goddess.

Concept history

Venus impudique

The genre term Venus was established in European art history long before the 19th century, as in the case of the ancient Aphrodite von Knidos , the Venus von Milo found in 1820 or the painting Venus von Urbino by Titian . It was adopted for the Paleolithic in 1864, after the first find of a woman's statuette, which the finder named Marquis de Vibraye because of its nudity Venus impudique (French for 'shameless Venus'). The mammoth ivory statuette was found in layers of the Magdalenian at the Abri Laugerie-Basse near Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil . The naming did not allude to the Roman "goddess of love", but is the description of complete nudity in the language of the 19th century. It stands in contrast to the art-historical term Venus pudica (shameful Venus) for female sculptures from Greco-Roman antiquity, which mostly concealed their shame . It was not until 1874 that an ancient sculpture was found with the Venus of Esquiline , which - like the Paleolithic figurines - is also completely naked.

Venus of Moravany

In 1894, the French archaeologist Édouard Piette compared the anatomy of the Vénus hottentote , a Hottentot woman Sarah Baartman exhibited at the beginning of the 19th century , with anatomical features of the Venus impudique . The background was the question of an immigration of the Paleolithic population or a comparison with living, supposedly “more primitive human races ”.

With the Venus von Willendorf , found in 1908, the term Venus was finally established. Since then it has been used for most of the new finds of female statuettes, in part regardless of whether they are depicted completely naked or in clothing, such as some of the Venus figurines from Malta .

In general, the term refers to Paleolithic figurines, but the time frame is sometimes extended to the Neolithic . Bernhard Maier, on the other hand, speaks out against extending the term to later cultures.

Appearance and material used

Venus from Dolní Věstonice

Most of the Paleolithic figurines represent women. Only a few figurines can be interpreted as male or are gender ambiguous. Some figurines show pronounced feminine features with particular accentuation of the breasts and buttocks . The abdomen and thighs were also often depicted disproportionately, so that these figurines now appear either heavily pregnant or very overweight. Other statuettes, however, show slender women, for example several figurines from Malta . The face of the statuettes is usually noticeably imprecise or deliberately left out. However, this does not apply to the Venus figurines from Malta , where the face is often designed or indicated.

The Venus figurines were made of stone (e.g. Venus von Willendorf ), bone or ivory (e.g. Venus vom Hohlefels , Lespugue, Moravany), but they were also formed from clay and loam and fired ( Venus von Dolní Věstonice ) . The latter was estimated to be between 25 and 29,000 years old, making it the world's oldest ceramic figure. The figures are usually smaller than 10 centimeters. At 22.5 cm, the Venus de Savignano is one of the largest.

classification

Henri Delporte proposed a simple classification of Paleolithic depictions of women according to their geographical origin, including figurines, paintings and reliefs. He differentiates depictions of women:

Cultural meaning

The cultural function of these objects is unclear; In contrast to some male counterparts, they were not used as everyday objects. Most interpretations can be reduced to two approaches that relate to magical-spiritual practices . Accordingly, these are representations to promote human fertility through fertility symbols or images of goddesses (especially mother goddesses ), a mixture of both aspects is also considered. The popular science side occasionally spoke of “ Paleolithic pin-ups ”. A connection with the fertility of fields can be ruled out, since the technology of agriculture was only developed later. However, if one interprets the exaggeration of the forms as obesity, the desire for a good supply of food can also be behind the figurines. Some authors have interpreted them as evidence of a matriarchal social organization, but this interpretation is considered unconfirmed in specialist science.

The obvious steatopygia of some figurines gave rise to speculation, especially in the first half of the 20th century, that there might be a connection with ethnic groups, where this form of the so-called " fat rump " occurs more frequently. This was supposedly the case with the Khoisan of southern Africa , for example . From today's point of view, such speculations are unfounded, as there are no indications of the immigration of the Gravettian population from southern Africa.

List of Paleolithic Venus figurines

Controversial finds

With regard to two finds from the Old Paleolithic , the Venus of Tan-Tan (Morocco) and the Venus of Berekhat Ram (Israel), there is a scientific dispute between archaeologists as to whether they are to be regarded as pure pseudo-artifacts or whether they have intentional traces of processing by prehistoric humans. The Australian archaeologist Robert G. Bednarik advocates the thesis that traces of processing are detectable that reinforce the already figural appearance of the stones, and describes the objects as "proto-figures".

See also

literature

  • Zoya A. Abramova: On the question of depictions of women in the Magdalenian. In: Kratkie soobščenija JJMK 76, 1959, 103-107.
  • Gerhard Bosinski , Gisela Fischer: The depictions of people from Gönnersdorf of the excavation in 1968. (The Magdalenian site Gönnersdorf 1). Steiner Franz Verlag, Wiesbaden 1974, ISBN 3-515-01927-8 .
  • Gerhard Bosinski: Les figurations féminines de la fin des temps glaciaires. In: Norbert Aujoulat (ed.): Mille et une femmes de la fin des temps glaciaires. Musée National de Préhistoire - Les Eyzies-de-Tayac, 17 June - 19 September, Paris 2011, pp. 49–72.
  • Ingmar M. Braun: The Upper Palaeolithic cabaret in Central Germany. In: Praehistoria Thuringica 12, 2009, pp. 164-179.
  • Claudine Cohen: La femme des origines. Images of the femme in the prehistoire occidentale. Paris, Belin-Herscher, 2003.
  • Jill Cook: Ice Age Art: the Arrival of the Modern Mind ; [... to accompany the exhibition of the British Museum from 7 February to 26 May 2013]. British Museum Press, London 2013, ISBN 978-0-7141-2333-2 .
  • Henri Delporte : The problem of statuettes féminines dans le leptolithique occidental. In: Mitteilungen der Anthropologische Gesellschaft Wien 42, 1962, pp. 53–60.
  • Henri Delporte: L'image de la femme dans l'art préhistorique , Ed. Picard 1979.
  • Rudolf Feustel : Upper Palaeolithic hunters in Thuringia. Weimar 1961.
  • Judith M. Grünberg: Women in the art of the Paleolithic. In: Harald Meller (ed.): Beauty, Power and Death. 120 finds from 120 years of the State Museum for Prehistory in Halle. State Office for Monument Preservation and Archeology Saxony-Anhalt , Halle (Saale) 2001, pp. 196–197, ISBN 3-910010-64-4 .
  • Christiane Höck: The female statuettes of the Magdalenian of Gönnersdorf and Andernach. In: Yearbook of the Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseums 40, 1993, pp. 253-316.
  • Michel Lorblanchet, Marie-Catherine Welte: Les figurations féminines stylisées du Magdalénien supérieur du Quercy. In: Bulletin de la Société des études littéraires, scientifiques et artistiques du Lot 108, 3, 1987, pp. 3-57.
  • Christine Neugebauer-Maresch: On the discovery of a female statuette at the Aurignac station in Stratzing / Krems-Rehberg, Lower Austria. In: Germania. Volume 67, Mainz 1989, ISSN  0016-8874 , pp. 551-559.
  • Eduard Peters: The paleolithic cultural site Peterfels. Augsburg 1930.
  • Erika Qasim: female statuettes. Two gestures as part of the presentation. A contribution to the interpretation . In: ArchaeNova eV (ed.): First Temples - Early Settlements. 12,000 years of art and culture. Excavations between the Danube and the Euphrates. Oldenburg 2009: 161-185
  • Volker Toepfer: Three late Paleolithic female statuettes from the Unstrut valley near Nebra. In: Find reports from Swabia NF booklet 17 (Festschrift for Gustav Riek). Stuttgart 1965, pp. 103-111.
  • Sergej Aleksandrovič Tokarev: On the importance of depictions of women in the Paleolithic. In: Publications of the Museum für Völkerkunde Leipzig 11, 1961, pp. 682–692.
  • Gernot Tromnau: Comments on the so-called "Venus statuettes" of the Stone Age In: The great goddess of fertility, Duisburg 1992, ISBN 3-923576-94-3
  • Karel Valoch, Martina Lázničková-Galetová (eds.): The Oldest Art of Central Europe. The first international exhibition of original art from the Palaeolithic. Brno 2009.
  • Hans Joachim Bodenbach: News on the discovery of the Venus von Moravany (Moravany nad Váhom, Slovakia) , in: Werner Budesheim (ed.): Festschrift 20 years of the Free Lauenburg Academy (contributions to science and culture, 10), self-published, 21465 Wentorf near Hamburg 2011, pp. 251-262.

Web links

Commons : Figurines of Venus  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christine Neugebauer-Maresch: On the new discovery of a female statuette at the Aurignac station Stratzing / Krems-Rehberg, Lower Austria. In: Germania. Volume 67, Mainz 1989, ISSN  0016-8874 , pp. 1-96.
  2. ↑ Venus of Eliseevichi: Characteristics of Russian Figurine. Retrieved August 21, 2018 .
  3. ↑ For example Ellen Schöpf: Life and death in the art of the pre-classical Indian cultures of Mesoamerica. A contribution to the development of the understanding of death. Winter, 2009, p. 30: “The tradition of the Venus figurines can be traced back to the Neolithic in many areas of the world, i. H. pursue beyond the threshold of settling down. "
  4. ^ Bernhard Maier: Prehistoric religions: sources and problems of interpretation. In: Michael Stausberg (Ed.): Religionswissenschaft , de Gruyter, 2012 (section on the Palaeolithic), pp. 183–195, here: p. 187.
  5. ^ H. Delporte: L'image de la femme dans l'art préhistorique , Ed. Picard (1993) ISBN 2-7084-0440-7 .
  6. ^ Luce Passemard: Les statuettes féminines paléolithiques dites Vénus stéatopyges. Librairie Teissier, Nîmes 1938.
  7. ^ Bednarik, Robert G., 2003, The earliest evidence of paleoart. Rock Art Research, 20 (2), pp. 89-135. See p. 93 and 96. Bednarik, Robert G., 2010, “An overview of Asian palaeoart of the Pleistocene”, Congrès de l'IFRAO, September 2010 - Symposium: L'art pléistocène en Asie (Pré-Actes) IFRAO Congress, September 2010 - Symposium: Pleistocene art of Asia (Pre-Acts)