“Herring Gull”
When I was a child, my Aunt Trudy had a “pet” seagull. “Gus” was a regular visitor who knew where he could easily get good food and she encouraged his visits whenever I was there. Because of Gus, because I lived on the coast, because my father was the marine editor of the Vancouver Sun and because of my interest in biology, I learned a lot about gulls, and one thing I learned was about the red dots and streaks that were a prominent feature on their majestic golden beaks. I always included the red in my drawings of Gus and other gulls—I have always loved birds and birdsong. I thought about Gus the other day as I was reading a new theory on an artistic conundrum: How did diverse and separate cultures all suddenly create the venus figurines?
“Venus of Willendof”
The term, “venus figurines,” refers to a group of prehistoric sculptures of women that share many features: heavy, wide thighs and large buttocks and (often) pendulous breasts. When I took art history courses, it remained a mystery as to how and why various isolated cultures of the upper Palaeolithic age created sculptures that so resembled one another in shape and size (all are very small—4 to 25 cm). Venus figurines have been found from Western European to Siberian cultures.
The first such sculpture was found around 1864 by by the Marquis de Vibraye, at Laugerie-Basse (Dordogne). A second was found in 1894, by Édouard Piette. In 1898, Salomon Reinach revealed his studies of a group of soapstone figurines from caves in Balzi Rossi (France). Then, in 1908, the most famous venus figurine, the “Venus of Willendof,” was discovered in Austria, and since then over one hundred of them have been found across the Eurasian continent.
The similarity of the figurines found over such a vast landscape—plus the certainty of art historians that the developments were serendipitous and not consequential—raises many questions? Did the sculptures represent an ancient ideal of beauty? Did they mean that steatopygia (a genetic predisposition to the accumulation of fat in the mid section) was common in ancient cultures? Or did several ancient cultures all develop a common shape for fertility symbols? Scholars could not satisfactorily answer these questions, so now we return to Gus.
Why? Because one theory proposed recently involved evidence built around responses of gulls to the red markings on the bills. Behavioral scientists painted ½” wooden strips yellow, and on each end they painted a red stripe. As they knew they would, gull hatchlings pecked vigorously at the red strip. When hatchlings were exposed to yellow wooden sticks with three red stripes, they went wild, not only pecking at the stick, but grasping it in their beaks.
When gull hatchlings were exposed to two sticks at once—one with one red stripe, the other with three red stripes—they completely ignored the stick with the single stripe. From this experiment, the behavioral scientists concluded that there is a genetic predisposition to the value of “more” within us and that what excites us, excites us more in excess. And at least one art historian is using this behavioral research to explain the sudden appearance of the venus figurines.
The thesis is, that ancient artisans modeled the female human venus figures exaggerating those parts that are sexualized by men—an erotic/fertility theory. Whether or not it is true, it adds another theory to the various attempts by scholars to explain a significant mystery in the history of art.
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