The very earliest figurative sculpture created by humans in the Palaeolithic was of a woman. The Venus of Hohle Fels, carved some 35,000 years ago, began an obsession with the feminine form which prevails into modern art. These figures are often known as ‘fertility figures’ or ‘mother goddesses’ on account of their curvaceous shape, emphasising the organs of generation and nurturing. Some have even speculated that they relate to a hypothetical ‘Great Goddess’, an imagined proto-deity who was shared by people across prehistoric Afro-Eurasia. But the reality is, we simply do not know what the purpose of such figurines was. All we can sell is that there must have been an incredibly compelling motivation to keep producing these figures, over tens of millennia, and in myriad places across Afro-Eurasia. While Central Europe was the main region for the production of such figures in the Palaeolithic, the centre of gravity moved to the Mediterranean by around 10000 BC. There, Neolithic ‘fertility goddesses’ were produced in great abundance, according to identifiable typologies associated with regions such as the Levant and North Africa.

A group of about 220 islands, scattered throughout the Aegean Sea off the Greek mainland, the Cyclades were one of the great cradles of civilisation. The society that emerged there took a great many cues from the Levant and Anatolia, but its independent development was by itself spectacular. These truly are the forerunners to the Golden Age of Greece. Little, however, is known about this culture. Their society seems to have been based, in the early period, on the semi-deliberate cultivation of wild barley (Hordeum spontaneum), emmer-wheat (Triticum turgidum), sheep and goats, pigs, and bluefin tuna (Thunnus thynnus) speared from shallow-hulled boats. The characteristic product of the Cyclades were female (very exceptionally male) schematic figures carved from the dazzling white marble which dominates the islands’ geology. Their artistic output is, no doubt, spectacular. Cycladic forms are noted in the fabric found at Knossos and other mainland Greek sites, demonstrating the significant impact of this little-known culture on the development of Minoan and Mycenaean Greece.

This is a beautiful example of the so-called Spedos Type, named for the cemetery-site in which the majority of such figures were found. This can be considered the ‘classical’ Cycladic figure: a shield- or lyre-shaped face, the smooth surface of which is interrupted only by the single protrusion of the nose. The shoulders are broad, and slightly angled, leading to slender arms which are folded across the abdomen below the line of the barely-defined breasts. Below the slim waist, the pubic triangle is emphasised, incised deeply and accurately. This figure has thick hips and thighs, which are also characteristic of the Spedos Type, and give this style a kind of hour-glass figure. When complete, the figure would have terminated in spade-like feet at an angle of around forty-five degrees to the vertical of the legs. These feet were not, on the whole, designed to allow the figure to stand, and so it is certain that these objects were not designed for display. They were, in fact, objects designed to be used: laid on their backs in tomb contexts, ritually buried, or held during some kind of ceremony. The highly polished surface of the marble, stained a light ochre from burial conditions, suggests both the care of the artisan and the probable repeated handling of this object. The fact that the majority of extant examples are female, and their hands are positioned to cradle their own stomachs, has led many historians to presume they had a function related to fertility. Whatever their purpose, the sheer number of figurines indicates that the form was very popular throughout the Cycladic islands and beyond.