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| Venus of Willendorf - ca. 24000 BC |
The Venus of Willendorf, now known in academia as the Woman of Willendorf, is an 11 cm (4.3 in) high statuette of a female figure estimated to have been made between 24,000 and 22,000 BCE. It was found in 1908 by a workman named Johann Veran (or Josef Veram) during excavations conducted by archaeologists Josef Szombathy, Hugo Obermaier and Josef Bayer at apaleolithic site near Willendorf, a village in Lower Austria near the city of Krems. It is carved from an oolitic limestone that is not local to the area, and tinted with red ochre. The "Venus of Willendorf" is now in the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, Austria.
Several similar statuettes and other forms of art have been discovered, and they are collectively referred to as Venus figurines, although they pre-date the mythological figure of Venus by millennia. -Wikipedia
Thoughts on Naming
a Black Woman Cathedral,
the Goddess of
Willendorf,
and the Primeval
Mother
James Hart
Her soul
will be your soul, your rose windows
in the dawns
you call your eyes, opening slow
and
following days’ specters assembling sunlight,
saints and
martyrs on the western front of night.
She needs no
edifice more ponderous than clouds,
a canyon
landscape for a nave will do, and floods
of starlight
stippling night’s ancient slated dome,
stone
penitents draped in veils in her votive home.
And for her
icon, carve your own paleolithic Venus
like Our
Lady of Lespugue, ivory idol of pendulous
breasts,
mounded belly full with child, hips ample
enough for
lands to drift upon, oceans flow to pull
of moonlight
in her prayers, her labor’s rhythms
in dithyrambic
wind, heft of heaven’s natal hymns.
(Poem from
an unpublished manuscript
entitled Somewhere West of Never)
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| Venus of Lespugue - ca. 24000 BC |
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