Oldest Venus: The Venus of Hohle Fels

As it's International Women's Day today we thought it only right that we post a picture of the oldest representation of a woman yet discovered: the Venus of Hohle Fels.  It was found in a cave with a bone flute which is the oldest known musical instrument.

Discovered fairly recently (in September 2008, so after this blog first appeared, but around the time of our post on the Venus of Dolni Vestonic) in the Swabian Alps in Germany the small (6cm) figure is carved out of Mammoth tusk. It has been dated to some 35,000 to 40,000 years old.

The figure has the usual large bust and pregnant looking belly of other prehistoric carvings but also an unusually anatomically rendered vulva.  It has a ring instead of a head so could well have been worn as an amulet.

It is intriguing to wonder whether this was based on a real woman...

Ukranian Venuses: the Trypilians

Agent Triple P has just attended a facinating exhibition in the Royal Ontario Museum about the mysterious Trypilian people of around 7000 years ago. They lived in what is now Ukraine, Moldova and Romania. They built uniquely large settlements for the time; numbering hundreds of houses and produced the most sophisticated neolithic pottery known.

There were several female "Venus" figures. We liked the ones who seemed to be pushing their breasts up and the slim enigmatic later one (Circa 3,500 BC).

An artist had been commisioned to produce some fine paintings of what Trypilian villages must have looked like but we think that he was letting his imagination run wild with this painting of a Trypilian priestess!

Czech Venus: by Jan Saudek

Czech photographer Jan Saudek (born 1935) hand tints his originally black and white pictures for a very painterly effect.

He uses a Rolleiflex and a FLEXARET 6x6 cameras.

For much of his early life he was persecuted, by the Germans for being Jewish and then by the Communist Czech government from whom he had to hide his work because of its erotic nature and the use of political themes. Even in the nineties he found some of his work banned, but this time in the west, for some of its religious motifs.

Some of his work harks back to nineteenth century erotic photography which was carefully posed in the studio (outdoor shots were almost impossible at this time) with formal props such as pillars or flower arrangements in order to give the impression of a classical, painterly tradition and hopefull avoid the attention of the authorities!

Many of Saudek's pictures of women also evoke the aesthetic of the Dolní Věstonice Venus, we feel.

Czech Venus: The Venus of Dolní Věstonice

Where to start but with this, the oldest known ceramic in the world; discovered on July 13th 1925 in the paleolithic settlement of Dolní Věstonice, Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic.

This figurine is 4 1/2 inches tall and about 1 3/4 inches wide and is made from fired clay. The original is now too fragile to be exhibited full time (she was in two halves when excavated) and was last on display in September 2007 as part of an exhibition entitled the Mammoth Hunters at the Prague National Museum.

Like many of these prehistoric Venus figures she is not designed to stand up so may have been designed to be held, perhaps as part of a ceremony. The truth is that we have no idea about her purpose, just that many other similar statues have been found across Europe from a similar period (although there is a strange lack of proven examples from the Iberian Peninsula).

These figures, as they are some of the earliest representations of the naked female form, have attracted a lot (some would say a disproportionate) amount of study. It is generally agreed that they are supposed to represent a pregnant figure and therfore may have something to do with fertility. It is also theorised that pre-Christianity the earliest religions were female-centric with the concept of the Earth Mother as supreme being and that these figures represent the Earth Mother herself. There is no evidence for this, however, but certain writers have been known to use this theory to decry the crushing of female power by the early Christian church.

The Laugerie-Basse figure

The use of the Roman name for Aphrodite, Venus, for these figures as a type was initiated by the Marquis de Vibraye, who discovered the first of these figures to be excavated at Laugerie-Basse in the Dordogne in 1864. He named his find Vénus impudique (immodest Venus), as an academic word play on the term Venus pudica (modest Venus) used to describe the particular coy pose seen in the Botticelli picture at the top right of this page. The French figure has a clear representation of the vulva, hence his name for her.

The use of the word Venus stuck and has since been used for all such figures, even if they have nothing to do with Venus or, indeed, any particular Goddess as far as is known.