18 i Flora Unveiled
her child- bearing years, but not actually pregnant. Alexander Marshack postulated that
the horn represents the crescent moon, and the thirteen lines represent the number of
crescent moons that make up a lunar year— a kind of lunar calendar.^18 The connection
between the lunar calendar, the female menstrual cycle, and the fertility implied by the
overall image is inescapable.
The Venus Figurines: Icons of Female Sexuality?The most famous of the portable anthropomorphic images of the Upper Paleolithic are
small statuettes referred to as “Venus figurines.” The epithet “Venus” was first applied to
these objects in 1864, in connection with a headless, armless, and footless ivory statuette of
a nude female discovered in the Dordogne region by French archaeologist Paul de Vibraye
(Figure 2.2A). Vibraye named his statuette “Vénus impudique” or “immodest Venus,”
a play on “Venus pudica” (“modest Venus”), which refers to a genre of classical sculp-
ture depicting the Venus modestly covering her breasts and pubic area with her hands.
The risqué term “Vénus impudique” implies that the statuette represents a love goddess
who, in contrast to her more refined classical counterpart, openly flaunts her sexuality.
However, though the figure is clearly female, it is probably that of a young girl rather than
a sex object. The “Vénus impudique” figurine dates to the Magdalenian period around
16,000– 12,500 years ago.
The term “Venus figurine” is usually reserved for a collection of mostly female figurines
that were produced during the Aurignacian and Gravettian periods between 29,000 and
21,000 years ago (see Table 2.1).^19 The first of these were discovered in a cave near Grimaldi,
Italy, between 1883 and 1895. At last count, well over 200 of these mostly palm- sized stat-
uettes have been unearthed from Paleolithic sites all over Europe— from the Pyrenees in
Figure 2.2 Examples of “Venus” figurines. A.Venus impudique. B. Venus of Willendorf.
C. Profiles of Venus figurines from various European locations.
A & B. Photos courtesy of Don Hitchcock and donsmaps.com. C. From Smith, N. W. (1992), An Analysis of Ice
Age Art: Its Psychology and Belief System. Peter Lang, p. 175.