The following is my translation of an article called: Die Willendorfer Venus, eine neue vorgeschichtliche Rundfigur eines Weibes von Dr Ludwig Hopf. It appeared in a German popular science magazine, Kosmos Handweiser für Naturfreunde 1910, Heft 7, Seiten 251-255. The original is packed with full frontal illustrations of nude babes with breasts, boobs, tits and everything! It's hot stuff. Copies of the crumpet can be supplied at ten quid a turn not including postage, brown envelopes and 'Artistic Material' stickers. The images may be a bit steamed up due to heavy breathing, and there may be some inexplicable smears. I did once seem a naked woman myself (honest), and if it hadn't been for the bikini... I'm not aware of any previous translation.
Trevor Dykes.

The Willendorf Venus, a new prehistoric rounded figure of a woman by Dr Ludwig Hopf
Ever since Boucher de Berthes conducted his research in 1838 in the Diluvian deposits of gravel and sand in Sommertal, and found fossil rhinoceros and elephant bones alongside of many flint tools made by human hands so as to open the path to a prehistory of people, this young science has been enriched year after year by new discoveries. Skeletons and parts of them soon came to light along with the stone and bone tools, and they undoubtedly pointed to a lower stage of human. In further episodes can be found the later remains of a higher race of people, and the excitement was great in the whole educated world, as the artistry of these prehistoric humans was demonstrated, with imposing representatives of their contemporary animal world from France, Keßlerloch near Thaningen and from near Schaffhausen in Switzerland. One gained respect for our predecessors in Europe and would have wished to know how they looked in life. This wish was also fulfilled, although only modestly, by a few contour sketches of human figures, all of which came from excavations in French caves.

From the cave of Laugerie Basse came the fragment of a reindeer shoulder blade containing an incomplete figure of a reindeer next to a naked female figure lying on the ground, which are engravings (la femme au renne). -On a piece of reindeer antler from the same cave one can see a bison with lowered head and raised tail to the left, and behind this is a man in close fitting fur clothing, who appears to have crept up on it (Illustration 1). With the exception of the arms, which are only weakly indicated, the drawing has been well executed. The nose and lower jaw are strongly pronounced; one finds no trace of a beard. -Less well worked is the head of another completely naked man, who is walking to the right with a stick or lance over his shoulder, with two heads of wild horses around him looking to the left. Here we see an unusual representation of the arts of a hunter from the Paleolithic; while the prey animals are depicted with enthusiasm and love, even with a measure of virtuosity, the person on the piece is comparatively sketchier (Illustration 2).

It is people from the third interglacial age, the so called Madeleine period, who have left us these sparse contour drawings of humans, and the finds do not extend beyond the borders of France. Neither in Belgium nor in Switzerland, nor in the caves of Swabia or Franconia, have such drawings of people been found. And, what also makes the French drawings so remarkable, is that the artists, who were so competent with the outlines of prey animals, had difficulties presenting human figures. Their efforts improve yet they hardly get beyond the ability of our children, when even that far, with their attempted drawings of undressed people.

Our children would rarely feel able to produce a rounded human figure from Bollen (clay, bone, stone). But there was a time in prehistory when artists gave themselves this challenge, in the second interglacial period, thousands of years earlier than the third (the Medeleine stage, Added note: it does say 'earlier', presumably accidentally.) mentioned above, and produced images of naked, curvacious people, as they may have been in this comparably warm period of the Earth.

The use of clay at that time is unthinkable as the prehistoric people, who possessed no baked clay vessels, were also unable to produce burned clay images capable of surviving the pressures of millennia. It is thinkable that earlier images of humans could have been carved from wood but, if there were any, the course of time would have reduced them to dust and crumbs. All beginnings are difficult; and thus the rounded figures of bone and stone, which have been taken from the ground, have a terrible rawness and can only raise a minimum of aesthetic appreciation. In Belgium (Province Namur) the sculpture from reindeer antler shown (Illustration 3) was excavated from the cave Marite near Pont à Lesse, with its poorly formed head with mere traces of eyes, the trunk devoid of arms and finally, strongly developed thighs which suggest the female sex. A 4.7cm figure us unmistakably presented by a statue from the cave of Barma grande near Menton; the projection of the stomach and weak hips are sufficient. The head, a round knob with no further details, is even rougher than that of the Belgian figure.

We laugh at the naivety of the old artists from the stages of Ausignac and Solutré, who seemed to be satisfied with quite monstrous human figures. But, if we look more closely at the works of this earliest artistic period, then we can find plenty with which to conclude that, there and then, there was also an attempt to process the material in realistic forms. In the year 1891, in the town of Brünn (Mähren), a human skull, further skeletal parts and a fragment from an ivory figure were dug up from 4 metres below the ground, and the figure, which was originally 22-23cm long, showed a naked man. Also available is the 7cm long head and the 14cm long torso with a left arm next to it. Legs were not originally present but rather, the torso gave way to a semi-circular shape, as was also the case for the figure from Belgium mentioned above. The realistic work, apart from the well made arm, was particularly concentrated on the head of the man. The plump skull with its low forehead, the strongly formed area of the eye brows, the round eye holes, the wide base of the nose and the massive lower jaw are all clearly depicted, and the face of the head and its brain capsule show the greatest similarity with the human skull found at the same time, and this has been recognised as belonging to a primitive, deep standing race of people.

There were artists at that time who could produce realistic images of the human body, and more besides. Below a thick layer of the Madeleine stage in the Grotte da Pape in South France was found, in 1891, a deeper stratum of the Solutré stage, and the French called this the Ebournien ('ivory layer') because of its rich concentration of raw and worked ivory (mammoth), and it is at Brassempouy. The French researcher, Piette, found three slim, headless female figures in this cultural layer, namely a very rough 5cm long girl figurate (la fillette), a 7cm long figure with a belt and a pair of unfinished female feet. There was also a further very interesting article, namely a small ivory head with a wide face, a long nose and a pointed chin, with the head covered by a peculiar hood-like hairstyle. -Additionally, the ground of Brassempouy yielded other ivory female figures of a different race. An 8cm long middle fragment was found in the year 1892, and the discoverer gave it the name of 'Venus of Brassempouy'. It is possible that the figure merited the name according to the taste of its maker. We can only recognise the shape of an extremely plump, waistless female with enormously developed breasts, hips and thighs, and must assume that the artist would not have created such an image had he not had a living model standing in front of his eyes. -Even rawer are the remains of a second, 5cm ivory figure found in the same grotto of Brassempouy in the year 1894 (Illustration 4). What is particularly striking about that figurate, apart from its strongly crooked spine, is the powerful development of the cheeks of the bottom, which gives the appearance of an extremely large bottom (steatopygy), and with the proportions paralleling a number of African races.

Two years later, in September 1896, Piette managed to discover a third ivory female torso in the ground of Brassempouy (Illustration 5). As can be seen from the picture, this is a 9.5cm long figure with a very differently proportioned female body. Missing are the head, the shoulders and arms, the upper right thigh and both lower thighs, and the extraordinary fatness of the two earlier statues is not evident; we recognise a clear waist with wide hips, but there is no trace of steatopygy, and that allows us to say that a counterpart for the live model of the artist could be found today among this or that people of the Earth.

Year after year has passed since the last find at Brassempouy, and one had already given up hopes of encountering similar rounded figures in the Aurignae and Solutré sites elsewhere in Europe beyond France, Belgium and Upper Italy but then, in the year 1908, the scientific world was surprised by the news from messieurs Dr Obermeier and Bayer, that they had found a limestone statuette of a naked female figure during their excavations of the cultural strata at Willendorf (Lower Austria), and this retained its head (Illustration 6). The image presented by this 11cm long figure shows a great similarity with the so called 'Venus of Brassempouy'. Here we have a constrained, meaty body with strongly developed breasts, hips and upper thighs and an impressive stomach. The only differences concern the thinly developed arms from the shoulders, and the presence of the head, albeit in a generalized round form with no traces of facial features. In contrast, we do see the hair of the head arranged in a spiral running from a central bun with indications of regular curls, and this would perhaps have been suitable for diagnosing the racial affinities of the woman if the other round figures, from Brassempouy, had retained their heads for comparison.

If we accept that the head with its spiral and curls displays the hair characteristic of one from the ranks of a Negroid female, as can, for example, be seen from the women of the Bushmen and Hottentots, then the absence of steatopygy for the 'Venus of Willendorf' does not concur with the Negroid type. There remains only the comparison of the hair with the hair-hood of the ivory head from Brassempouy whose long nose, however, does not permit a referral to the Negroid race.

What now? We can but say: the round figures from Magrite in Belgium and Barma grande in Upper Italy, and the so called Venus statuettes of Brassempouy and Willendorf, show the women of the Aurignae and Solutré men, who lived in caves, and partly on the open ground, of West and East Europe during the second glacial interlude. And which race these people belonged to can be seen from the find at Brünn, where, as well as a skull, was also found an ivory male figure, and its head had the same form as the skull and indeed, the pronounced form of a Neanderthal skull. If the spirals on the head of the 'Venus of Willendorf' represent a hair style, then it is not to be wondered that, as shown by the hood style on the head from Brassempouy, the woman of the earliest times had already grasped how to make herself beautiful.

It is not possible to define which race the slim and lean girl and women figures from Brassempouy belonged to, as there are no decisive clues and they are all unfortunately without heads. Possibly the head described above also belonged to such a slim body. We will never know for sure.

We are, however, justified to conclude that the torso (Illustration 4), with which the artist depicted a woman, did belong to the Negroid race. How else should he have arrived at imagining the steatopygy and lordosis (the inward bend) of the spine in a white woman, as the features are only known from members of the Bushmen and Hottentot race, and namely the dwarf peoples spread across the whole of Africa? (In this regard see the illustration of an Akka girl in volume II, page 163 of Lampert's Völker der Erde.) And what should be impossible about the presence of Negroids among the people of the Solutré period, as pygmies lived among their taller grown neighbours at Schweizersbild during the Neolithic and, as Prof. Segi has demonstrated, many small people now in Italy are probable descendants of dwarf peoples who crossed from North Africa at the time of a landbridge, where pygmies still live in the mountains, and migrated into Europe.

If we cast a quick look back at the course of our examination, then we cannot shut out the impression that the finds of human images, namely those rounded likenesses, have provided a strong step forwards in our knowledge of the prehistory of people, and we have at least partly fulfilled our wish to know how humans of the Old Stone Age looked. And we have also learned a second thing, that the idea long postulated by the prehistorian Hörnes in his Urgeschichte der bildenden Kunst is inescapably true, that the beginnings of prehistoric cultural development were not geometrical decorations and not natural depictions of animals and, indeed, not even rounded figures of animals, but rather sculptured figures of people were the objectives of artistic endeavours. He is here in line with the art historian, Alois Regel, who wrote the sentence: "of both great classes of decorative arts, regardless of the widespread opinion to the contrary, the artistic production of sculptures is the elder and that of flat pictures the younger, and may be termed refined." This opinion also finds justification in psychology, should we assume that prehistoric people wanted to hold the product of their artistic endeavours in the hand, until subsequent groups learned to sanctify the image through drawing. Finally, if we make comparisons with the artistic gifts of purely hunter tribes, so can we find that most have gone over to drawing, and only the Eskimos and Indians of North America continue to cultivate three dimensional sculptures alongside of flat pictures.

Translator's note
Those wanting further information on the pygmies of North Africa, Schweizersbild and the famous tribes in Italy, are advised to contact Dr Hopf directly should they know a suitable and unusually talented medium.
DrHopf@heaven.com

An index of more of my translations of old Kosmos articles can be found at:

Kosmos Translations Archive

A number of Mesozoic (and post-Mesozoic) location summaries can be found at Localities.