Manolo for the Big Girl Fashion, Lifestyle, and Humor for the Plus Sized Woman.

August 13, 2008

Big Girls in Art: Austria celebrates the original Big Girl!

Filed under: Art,Fat and Famous,The Fat's in the Fire — Francesca @ 9:13 am

Thank you to our reader Jamie, who alerted us to the celebrations in Vienna surrounding the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Venus of Willendorf.

She is indeed the beautiful, fertile, sexy, voluptuous, original superfantastic Big Girl!

willendorf.jpg

3 Comments

  1. The Venus of Willendorf has a cool vibe to her – calm, peaceful…complete. There are lots of other Venuses/Venii(?) but she’s the best preserved.

    Comment by shiloh — August 13, 2008 @ 11:05 pm

  2. I had a great anthropology professor in college who had a theory that the Venus figurines were not highly stylized images of the female form, as many art historians think they are. Rather, he argued that they were anatomically accurate depictions of the sort of woman perfectly adapted to survive the Ice Age, the period to which the Venuses date. People then subsisted on a diet primarily made up of fatty meat, so it’s not unlikely that many people looked like her (pace Dr. Atkins.) Anyhoodle, the professor silenced a cranky art historian once who insisted with a little too much fervor that prehistoric people could not have been fat (Impossible! Absolutely contrary to the natural order!) by noting: (1) you weren’t there, and (2) one of the most technically magnificent things about the Venus figurines is their level of detail, right down to folds and flaps and cellulite dimples. If you asked a skinny person who had never seen a fat person to sculpt their idea of a fat person, it would probably just be a bigger version of a skinny person. But the anatomical precision of the Venus figurines demands a live model. And that model was the artist’s ideal of beauty and fertility! He finished the lecture by noting that — notwithstanding narrow modern views of beauty — it was thanks to women like the Venus of Willendorf that European people survived the Ice Age.

    Comment by Anon — August 14, 2008 @ 2:38 pm

  3. i will remenber this story for life i will bookmark this for sure

    Comment by installation cinema maison — November 18, 2010 @ 3:33 pm

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