The Venus of Willendorf, also known as the Woman of Willendorf or Nude Woman, is at the centre of a pornographic scandal on Facebook.  Apparently, the Upper Palaeolithic Female dated to circa 28,000-25,000 BC has been censored and targeted as “inappropriate content” after the Italian arts activist Laura Ghianda posted a picture of the artwork on the social networking site which went viral. According to Christian Koeberl, the facility’s director general at the Natural History Museum in Vienna, “There is no reason to cover the ‘Venus of Willendorf’, and hide her nudity, neither in the museum nor on social media.”

In looking at her, what immediately draws the viewer’s attention is the over-representation of spherical forms as the hypertrophic and tempting breast, stomach, legs and bottom. She also exhibits, in ways that are at once appealing to most women, a physical and sexual self that seems unrestrained, unfettered by cultural taboos and social conventions. She is an image of “natural” femaleness, of uninhibited female power, which ‘civilization’, in the figure of the Classical Venus, later sought to limit and bring under control. 

Perhaps she would be the portrait of a real person. But critics cannot determine if this is true since the Venus belonged to the Stone-Aged nomadic society when women commonly dedicated to hunting and gathering more than men. Moreover, she could represent the escape from anxieties and the inner gap inside the unconscious, as a sacred feminine. 

The statue is still an “icon” for the museum and an artistic inspiration for other artworks. For example, in the Young Pope, English-language Italian drama television series directed by Paolo Sorrentino in 2016, the Venus is a tool for revealing the Cardinal’s sins: Angelo Cardinal Voiello (Silvio Orlando) makes very dirty and impure thoughts on the statue.

Another case of censorship is The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet. It was censored after its publication on the social platforms by a primary French teacher. The painting becomes a scandal as it seems that The Origin of the World is part of another artwork that may originally have had a lot in common with Courbet’s Woman with a Parrot (1866). So Courbet did not ruthlessly portray just one part of a woman, but he seems to paint a full nude. 

We don’t really know which would be the final decision for the Venus, but we should remind Facebook that since art means a work produced ‘by human creative skill and imagination‘, everyone has the right to express their own creativity openly.