1. Venus of Willendorf
A sculpted limestone figurine from Palaeolithic Europe (circa 30,000 Before Present), the Venus of Willendorf is one of many statuettes depicting a woman with exaggerated sexual features. These nude sculptures, with features linked to fertility and childbearing emphasised and enlarged, are believed to represent an ancient mother goddess. It’s difficult to know what the Venus’s purpose would’ve been, with diverging theories of their usage in religious worship or as a self-portrait created by women. Some scholars reject this term “Venus”, and perhaps quite rightly; not only do the figurines predate Greco-Roman mythology by millennia, but it is not a statue of eroticism or sexuality. Instead, it is one of motherhood and childbirth. A nice thought, then, that they might have been created by women, for women—rather than a Venusian male gaze.
2. Fascinus
Turning to ancient Rome—and changing gender, the fascinus was the embodiment of the divine phallus and masculine generative power. Across Roman sites, these carvings, etchings and sculptures are omnipresent. Go on a trip to Pompeii, and you’ll find almost every street to be well-endowed. Understandably so, given their supposed sacred ability to ward off evil and bestow divine protection on their user. The author Pliny even termed them a remedy for envy—a medicus invidiae, or evil eye. Admittedly, it’s likely not so positive and artistic an image to find when it’s on the back of a bathroom door in the Hamilton.
3. Sheela na Gig
From the Middle Ages, another figurative carving of naked women—this time, with exaggerated genitalia and an almost-cartoonish face. The name comes from an Irish phrase, owing to their abundance across Ireland and other Celtic regions, and though there’s disagreement over its origin, it might mean something like “the old hag of the breasts”. A representation of a hag-like figure, a fertility symbol loaned out to women in labour, an apotropaic protective charm, or an anti-misogynistic empowering figure of female sexuality, theories abound about their meaning.
4. The Origin of the World, Gustave Courbet
Courbet’s 1866 depiction of a naked woman, lying on a bed with her legs apart, takes us nearer to the present-day. Pushing the limits of realism, Courbet refuted the academic tradition of the idealised nude and rejected the hypocritical social conventions that allowed a pornographic eroticism in paintings that depicted myth and dreams. Though graphic, this is not an erotic painting—its body is realistic and nothing else. Courbet’s model, interestingly, was an Irish woman known as Jo, and it was commissioned by an Ottoman diplomat to add to his own personal collection.
5. Autumn Trees – The Maple, Georgia O’Keeffe
Since her first exhibition in New York, 1916, O’Keeffe’s tender, imaginative illustrations of plants and flowers have become subject to an assumption that they are depictions of female genitalia—an assumption widely accepted, it seems, but inherently based on conservative male critics’ reading of her work as erotic and sexual. Not only is it a reduction of her art, but it’s one that O’Keeffe herself resisted throughout her life. A recent Tate Modern exhibition has tried to illustrate her multifaceted artistry, moving away from these singular interpretations. Just like so much of our art that has unclothed the human form, it’s often the viewer that brings in an erotic, vulgar, or otherwise loaded perspective. Art is expression—and whether it’s battling evil, praising a deity, or breaking convention, it is all too complex to
