--- KATHRYN P ROSENTHAL <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I don't know why, but I have always thought that the
> figurines were the
> "idealized" woman, the fantasy woman, the Pamela
> Andersen (sp?) of the paleo
> age.  They represented how a woman could look if she
> had all the fruit/food
> she wanted.
>
> I never thought of them as in any way representing
> how women actually looked
> at that time

I was just wondering how well the obese figure could
be visualized by a sculptor without ever having seen
one. The Venus of Willendorf doesn't just have the
round protruding belly of pregnancy, she has huge
pendulous breasts and thighs almost as wide as they
are long. Pregnancy alone won't cause a women to put
on that much weight. The Willendorf Venus possibly
sprang from the un-aided imagination of her sculptor,
but she looks pretty well-observed to me. On the other
hand it's certainly possible that her form is pure
exaggeration, after all the head is way to large in
proportion to the rest of the body, and the facial
features are eliminated completely.

"Significantly, none of the few Paleolithic male
figures in sculpture or in engraved images is shown
corpulent. If the woman of Willendorf was a special
female, who might she have been?

The life-like treatment of both the overall form of a
fat woman and such details as the figure's knees and
the dimples where the upper arm meets the chest, has
caused at least one writer to suggest that the
sculptor must have had a real woman before his eyes."

-from
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/willendorf/willendorfwomen.html

Lara



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