Prehistoric Sculpture
The range of bodies styles that have been made or drawn by humans throughout history is breath taking. All images of the body have something in common, they aren't realistic they are naturalistic and often exaggerated in some way or another.
The two images below from:
The video "How Art Made The World" took us back in time to discover why we draw our bodies so "weird". At the start of last century, three archeologists found something very important, a figure of a woman that was 25000 years old, near the small town of Willendorf in Austria.
This statue now known as the Venus of Willendorf, was made by nomadic people thousands of years ago. It is 4 inches high made out of limestone and is now housed in the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria. It is worth 60 million Dollars.
The Venus of Willendorf is very unrealistic and some parts of the body very exaggerated such as the breasts, stomach and genitals. For 20 000 years humans made statues that were exaggerated in this way (parts were bigger than others).
But why did these artists do this?
The video "How Art Made The World" explains one theory through making comparisons between seagull behaviour and the primitive human brain. Seagull chicks are attracted to sticks that are exaggerated versions of their mother's beaks and in the same way primitive humans were drawn to exaggerated depictions of what mattered to them i.e the pregnant human female.
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