Venuses of Vienna
Cultic worship in the Habsburg capital.
Although they now live practically next door to one another, the two Venuses of Vienna never met.
The first Venus of Vienna resides at the Natural History Museum under the name “Venus of Willendorf”—Venus on account of the oolite limestone statuette being so obviously female, and Willendorf after the village adjacent to her excavation site. She holds court in a dedicated cabinet, suspended at eye level by a rod that lifts her about a foot off her pedestal. The floating effect this produces is no mere flourish of curatorial panache. She cannot, after all, stand upright. Her knock-kneed legs end in rounded stubs instead of feet. By late afternoon her glass case bears the nose prints of her admirers, whom she grants an audience every day except Tuesdays.
The second Venus of Vienna, better known as the late Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, resides a five minute walk away. Her remains are preserved in the Habsburg crypt on Tegetthoffstraße, but her persona is permanently summoned for consumption inside her renovated palace apartments, rechristened as the Sisi Museum and open to the public since 2004. Here her possessions and reproduced selections from her wardrobe are presented as evidence of her unconventional tastes and singular personality. Viewing them is worth, to be exact, 17.50 euros per person. The audio guide is included.
Incidentally, I encountered Willendorf first. It was late in the day and she was still accepting visitors, whereas the Empress’s chambers were shut for the evening. It felt right, for reasons both chronological and sentimental. The 30,000-year-old Willendorf was the first caryatid upon which my higher art history education was laid. We’re basically buddies from college.
Willendorf is a peculiar creature, absolute matter. She is stasis personified, a walled cell. Her head is wrapped in braids or a headdress or something else that resembles a beehive and covers her entire face. Her arms and hands drape limply across the gentle curves of her drooping breasts. The vertical slit between her legs is etched so matter-of-factly it might have struck the men who found her as almost shameless. (It wouldn’t have been the first time. The first Palaeolithic female figurine ever found was dubbed Vénus impudique or “Immodest Venus” in 1864 on account of her similarly unabashed nakedness.) The more pressing question, however, is how she appeared to the person who made her.
In his 1996 paper “Self-Representation in Upper Paleolithic Female Figurines,” Leroy McDermott hypothesized that the Venus of Willendorf and similar statuettes were carved by women using their bodies as references. Interpreting them through the vantage point of looking down at one’s own female body explained the exaggerated foreshortening and top-heavy proportions as well as the figurines’ consistent facelessness. Willendorf was carved roughly 25,000 years before the first manufacture of mirrors, meaning it’s unlikely her sculptor would have possessed any consistent awareness of her own reflection or been able to easily make a prolonged study of her own face. That being said, naturally reflective surfaces like puddles definitely existed in the Stone Age, which is for many critics a major strike against McDermott’s theory.
Puddles, however, don’t make for an instant gotcha here. If we interpret Willendorf as self-portraiture, her facelessness can be similarly explained in theoretical terms. As a historical artifact, she predates the concept of the individual self upon which Western visual culture will later be founded. It’s not difficult to imagine the woman who carved Willendorf thinking of herself as her body, more specifically her trunk, subject as it was to its own indomitable will with each pregnancy. Conception, gestation, and birth was the central cycle of her life, and it took place not in her head or her face but in her womb and belly and breasts. Enrobed in and ruled by these organs, how likely is it that she would have derived any sense of selfhood from her own face, which she didn’t necessarily even see on a daily basis?
Willendorf is a Venus concealed. She is made remote not only by her lack of a face but by the obliteration of individualism by nature’s totalitarian command of the female animal. She is but one of many manifestations of a primitive female earth cult in which fertility was the first and most mysterious magic. She is not herself at all. She is instead what Camille Paglia calls “the womb-tomb of mother nature” experiencing itself.
Elisabeth of Bavaria, known to her aristocratic family as Sisi, was born in Munich in 1837. At the age of 16 she married her cousin Franz Josef I and was crowned Empress of Austria. She was considered a great beauty, and her efforts to uphold this reputation are the best-known aspects of her biography. She maintained her 20-inch waist through strict starvation diets and grueling exercise routines and further accentuated it with tightlacing. Her hair reached her ankles; washing it with a special mixture of cognac and egg whites was a day-long process. She refused to sit for portraits after turning 40, and hid from curious onlookers behind an arsenal of fans and parasols for the remainder of her life.
The cult of beauty and personality Elisabeth slavishly cultivated made others regard her as exceptional, and it went beyond static appearance. In his autobiography, German Emperor Wilhelm II wrote, “She did not sit down, she lowered her body; she did not stand up, she rose.” Maria Theresia, Landgravine of Fürstenberg, described the essence of her beauty as outside the scope of the visually reproducible: “What she was really like, what made her so attractive and enchanting, cannot be rendered by the sculptor’s chisel or painter’s brush.”
If we accept these eyewitness accounts, we’re left at an interesting junction. The totality of Elisabeth’s person eludes the art object. Now contrast this with Willendorf, who is total femaleness condensed into art object, so much so that we perceive her as undeniably human but not quite as an individual person.
Together Willendorf and Elisabeth bookend the epoch of the Western Venus, and reveal her profound aesthetic and symbolic evolution. Willendorf is a Venus Vulgaris, the earthbound Venus of sex and birth, life-giving physicality embodied. Elisabeth is a Venus Coelestis or celestial Venus, a bastion of divine love and unimpeachable beauty whose perfection elevates her beyond the Venus Vulgaris’s fundamental physicality. This means that Elisabeth’s strenuous efforts to preserve her beauty culminated in her death, when her vulgar bodily reality surrendered completely to the celestial image cult she had created. The dichotomy of the Venuses of Vienna is, at its heart, reducible to material versus ephemeral. Elisabeth is the ungraspable feminine purified of the froth and filth of femaleness. Willendorf, however, is that froth.
And yet it is in Elisabeth that the diverging theories of Willendorf’s creation—female self-conception versus cultic object produced for male ritualistic consumption—unite. Elisabeth made herself into a figure of cultic beauty on an imperial scale. That her image cult, of which she was the primary architect, endures with such fervor is proof of its outsize success. To refer to it in pagan terms is no unwarranted dramatization. Her Greek tutor Konstantin Christomanos described her daily hairdressing as a “sacred ritual.” Her niece Marie Larisch recalled how the Empress “worshiped her beauty like a heathen to his idols” and “regarded the sensation of being worshiped as a tribute offered to her beauty.”
Elisabeth and the nineteenth century met their respective ends almost simultaneously. She departs the historical stage in 1898, just before the new modernity is birthed in the trenches of the First World War. But the initial pangs of this monstrous birth and the iconoclasm it bred, rightfully or wrongfully, were felt some months before the outbreak of war on March 10, 1914, inside London’s National Gallery. Using a meat cleaver hidden up her sleeve, Mary Richardson sliced open the milky back of Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus in direct protest of the brutal treatment of imprisoned suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst. The canvas was sutured back together, but the Western Venus never recovered.
The Venuses of Vienna, as we meet them now, are unsettlingly alike.
Both are objects of cultic worship. They are the products of intense inborn subjugation, lorded over by their own fertility or by a self-imposed regimen of brutal physical discipline. They are paragons of concealment, and crowned by something inextricably linked to their identity yet somehow separate, even alien, from their bodies. Elisabeth described her famous hair as “like a foreign body on my head,” and when Christomanos compared it to a crown, she responded that “any other crown is more easily laid aside.” Crown, headdress, or hair—in Willendorf and Elisabeth these distinctions blur. But if Willendorf’s crown-headdress-hair conceals, then it’s worth noting that Elisabeth’s has the opposite effect of making her more recognizable.
The Venuses of Vienna are bound not only by visual concealment but by unrelenting silence. Willendorf’s silence is innate in that she has no mouth and certainly no written records about her. Elisabeth was so insecure about her teeth that according to her biographer Brigitte Hamann she at first “parted her lips as little as possible whenever she spoke” and eventually “abandoned her pitiful attempts at conversation and contented herself with appearing with her lips resolutely closed.” Her silence became emblematic of her while she was alive—Hamman writes of her reputation as “beautiful but dumb”—and it subsumes her still.
It only follows that the Venuses of Vienna are apolitical. Willendorf predates politics; everything suggested about her is by default a post-discovery projection. Barring a single political dalliance on behalf of the Hungarians, Elisabeth was wholly disengaged from the politics of court and of her empire, absconding from the imperial seat of Vienna at nearly every opportunity.
In spite of her deliberate disengagement, Elisabeth’s role as Empress necessarily forced her into becoming a bizarre nineteenth century conception of a fertility demigoddess. Her womb was the most important womb in Austria. A dynasty hinged upon it. She dutifully fulfilled this role by having four children, including a male heir who survived to adulthood. But then she resumed tightlacing. She permitted neither pregnancy nor motherhood to derail the measures required to maintain her beauty cult above all else.
It’s interesting how this all combines to make Elisabeth the exact opposite of her predecessor (and great-great-great aunt by marriage) Maria Theresa, the Austrian Archduchess and Holy Roman Empress who ruled over Habsburg dominions for four decades until her death in 1780. As an absolute monarch she was neither silent nor apolitical, and her body was very much that of a woman who carried 16 pregnancies to term. She fused her literal maternal prowess with her figurative role as mother of the nation, and Martin van Meytens’s portraits painted at the height of her power depict her ample jowl, wide bust, and thick neck. She is a grand dame, shapely and solid, occupying every inch of her throne. By the end of her childbearing years her silhouette no doubt more closely resembled Willendorf’s than Elisabeth’s.
Maria Theresa merits further mention here because her public memorial is positioned quite literally between Willendorf and Elisabeth. Flanked by equestrian statues of her field marshals she appears in bronze over the plaza bearing her name, which also happens to be one of two plazas you must cross when transiting between Elisabeth’s Hofburg apartments and Willendorf’s cabinet.
I found myself attempting to do exactly this on Austria Day, which the federal government had chosen to celebrate by filling the Hofburg with a grotesque display of military might. Fathers carrying children on their shoulders and military police toting automating rifles milled around tanks, a twin engine jet, beer tents, and army recruitment stalls. Kids leapt onto an inflated pad from a raised platform and clambered into the backseats of armored vehicles on display. Camouflage was the prevailing sartorial palette.
It struck me as a bitterly comic spectacle, plunked smack dab in the middle of Vienna’s Venus corridor. The triad of celestial purified femininity and total femaleness and autocratic queenly authority that is Elisabeth, Willendorf, and Maria Theresa was, it seems, a provocation warranting nothing less than an ostentatious demonstration of lethal masculinity. Such distinct yet overlapping iterations of female power and feminine mystique clearly could not be allowed to exist unchecked. Male destruction can never sanction female creation and self-conception, however it emerges, which is to say however she goes about conceiving herself.
The Greek Aphrodite turned Roman Venus has her roots in the Mesopotamian deity Ishtar. Ishtar was the goddess of love and fertility, but she was also the goddess of war. Early cults dedicated to Aphrodite worshiped her as a warrior goddess—an iteration historians call Aphrodite Areia, or “Aphrodite the Warlike”—and one statue dating as late as the first century BC shows her with a sword and sheath.
But the perception of Venus as a goddess incompatible with combat had long since taken precedence. The Aphrodite of Knidos, which is the first fully nude freestanding statue of the goddess, dates to 350 BC and depicts her as a paragon of beauty and softness, reaching for her towel after a bath. Prior to that, her 8th century BC appearance in book five of Homer’s Iliad is one of the rare instances in Greek hexameter poetry of an Olympian being wounded by a mortal warrior. In the poem she flees the battlefield after Diomedes pierces her wrist with his spear. She is subsequently chided by Zeus:
And calling Venus, thus address’d his child:
Not these, O daughter are thy proper cares,
Thee milder arts befit, and softer wars;
Sweet smiles are thine, and kind endearing charms;
To Mars and Pallas leave the deeds of arms.”
Emily Wilson’s recent translation specifies these so-called milder arts:
At this, the father of the gods and men
Smiled, and then summoned golden Aphrodite,
And said to her, “My child, the work of war
is not your area. Concern yourself
with marriage and the workings of desire.
Fierce Ares and Athena will attend
to all of that.
To be a Venus is to be stripped of your arms and made prisoner to your body and your beauty. To be a Venus is to be consumed by the workings of being desired and worshiped by others, then bearing the consequences of that desire and worship. These milder arts are deceptively named. To exist at the center of a beauty cult, especially if it is a beauty cult of your own design, is no mild art, and Venus power comes at a high price, however willingly paid.
Beauty is not like the spoils of war. It is peacefully and randomly bestowed, not fought for or seized. The start of the battle to maintain it is delayed until years after it has been granted, and there is no question as to its final outcome. It will be lost, every time, without exception, all at the hands of an invisible force.
It’s no wonder then that any human Venus must produce an image cult and obscure herself behind it. In Elisabeth we reach the ultimate Western Venus, the ultimate modern Venus, the ultimate concealed Venus: not an aging woman hiding behind a fan but a dead woman remembered as her youthful image, her mythology made inextricable from her biography. Elisabeth may be entombed in the Habsburg crypt but the twisted pinnacle of her legacy is the Sisi Museum gift shop, where she is forever enshrined in mass-produced souvenirs. She is a remarkable Venus because she transformed herself from flesh and blood to a perfect image and in doing so rendered herself as eternal as Willendorf. The only real difference now is that Willendorf is frozen in limestone, and Elisabeth is frozen in key chains, refrigerator magnets, Christmas ornaments, and pocket mirrors.