The article Venus of Willendorf by Cristopher Witcombe, makes me think of contemporary issues of religion and beliefs due to the fact that they consider that statue to be a symbol of Eve because they are describing her to symbolize being the first women. She is considered the Eve of their era. This also compares to contemporary art in ways because religion has played and affected the history and styles of art, especially in the way she is created nude. The article describes this figure even though not much is known about it because it shows the woman figure was represented and criticized in art by the people of that time period.
The statue of Venus was originally nicknamed “the pear” because of her torso shape. The Venus is rounded around the mid-section of her body and gets like more narrow toward the top and toward the bottom. Later a man named Piette changed the outlook of the name by connecting the name with the statues pubic area, because that area on the statue stands out. The article talks about how sometimes the name Venus is substituted for the word woman, which would not fit into society now because it is not socially fitting because society does not see her shape and figure acceptable. A perception of a goddess now would be like a Barbie or Ken body type, and so the name change is to emphasize that she is not to be seen as a goddess but a woman figure. Her sculpted body shape was unusual. She had extremely large breasts, with a bulging stomach, thunder thighs, and her private area look like it was where they spent the most time carefully carving it in great detail to their view of perfection. The least detailed feature in my opinion along with the article is the face. As the article too believes that the face is a significant feature of humans and it distinguishes us from one another. In my opinion maybe they did not focus on the face because they were trying to show that women of all cultures share the same body make up, but faces are something that show the differences in cultures.
The article informed us about a good point referring to her weight and size during that time. Since back then your way of getting food was through work in hunting and gathering, so there would be no way to gain that much weight unless you were someone that the people held as a significant person to the group. And in that case she would have the opportunity to weigh this much as the sculpture shows us, and maybe that is even why they created this figurine of her. There has always been like figures like mother earth and such so maybe this was just their interpretation of mother earth at their time.
When the statue was found there was signs of red dye which the article tells us has been used to define life in the aspect of the menstrual cycle.
