The Venus of Willendorf

The story

A small woman made of stone

If you hold a hand clenched in a fist, you have in front of you roughly her size: eleven centimetres. The Venus of Willendorf is a statuette of pale limestone, with the round, full body of a woman. She has no face: where it should be, there is a tilted head covered with horizontal rows of small shapes, which may be plaits, curls or a kind of headdress. The thin arms rest on the chest; the legs end quickly, with almost invisible feet. Traces of red colour, ochre, remain on the surface, and it is thought that originally she was painted all over.

She was carved about 29,500 years ago, in a period that archaeologists call the Gravettian, when the climate in Europe was cold and hunters chased herds of mammoths, horses and reindeer. For a long time the last ice age was thought of as an age of hard living and few thoughts; the statuette tells us that the human beings of the time could think, create and give an object a meaning.

The discovery

In 1908 in the village of Willendorf in Austria, on the Danube, in the valley called the Wachau, work was in full swing on a new railway line. The workers, digging in the loess soil, a yellowish dust carried by the wind, found traces of ancient camps. Archaeologists from the Natural History Museum in Vienna, among them Josef Szombathy, Hugo Obermaier and Josef Bayer, dug on the spot. On 7 August 1908 a statuette came to light from a layer of the ground. Who found it first? According to accounts it was a worker; but the credit for understanding its value belongs to the archaeologists who directed the digging.

Scholars called her a “Venus”, after the Roman goddess of love and beauty. It was perhaps a bit of a joke: a figure so different from the classical ideal looked almost like a “Venus” in reverse. Today many people think the name is misleading, because we do not know whether the statuette represented a goddess, a real woman, a mother or a symbol, and some scholars prefer to call her simply the “Woman of Willendorf”.

A journey of hundreds of kilometres

The most recent surprise concerns the stone. It is an oolitic limestone, that is, made of countless tiny spheres, like fish eggs (hence the name, from the Greek òon, “egg”). In the Willendorf area this stone does not exist. A study published in 2022 by the University of Vienna and the Natural History Museum used tomography, a kind of X-ray scan, to see inside the statuette and compare the grains with rocks from many countries. The result is that the most similar oolite is found in northern Italy, in the area of the Lessini Mountains and north of Lake Garda.

This means that the stone, or the statuette already finished, travelled hundreds of kilometres, crossing the Alps or going round them, in an age with no roads or wheels. Perhaps hunters carried it during their seasonal movements, perhaps it was exchanged between groups. In any case, the statuette was so important to its owners that someone made it travel far from home.

What was it for?

Nobody knows. There are many ideas: a symbol of fertility, of abundance, a good-luck charm, an object to hold in the hand during a ritual, a model of beauty, a portrait, a toy, a self-portrait of the person who carved her. There are no texts or stories to explain. Even the idea that she was a “mother goddess” is a modern interpretation, not proof.

She is not alone. In Europe more than a hundred Palaeolithic statuettes called “Venuses” are known, found from France to Russia. One, found in 2008 at Hohle Fels in Germany, is made of mammoth ivory and is about 40,000 years old: it is considered the oldest known “Venus”. In Italy there are a few, such as the Venus of Savignano, in Emilia, and the statuettes of the Balzi Rossi, in Liguria. The Venus of Willendorf is kept today in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, where she draws a great many visitors every year.