The Mother Goddess

One of the most explicitly 'artistic' productions of pre-Nuragic Sardinia is represented by the figurines of 'mother goddess'. These are small sculptures (they fluctuate around 10-15 cm in height, but there are also smaller and larger ones) depicting female figures.

The name “mother goddess” attributed to these sculptures derives from the context of their discovery, always in a funerary environment, which has led scholars to hypothesize that these images may be a sacred representation of the physical and symbolic space in which the deceased is placed: the 'Earth', conceived as a 'generator' of life and therefore as a 'mother', in whose 'womb' (the hypogeic tomb) the deceased is welcomed again. However, these are (it should be specified) interpretative hypotheses.

The oldest of these figures is the so-called “Venus of Macomer”, whose date, not certain, seems to be framed in the ancient Neolithic.
The style of representation varies according to the chronological and cultural phase. We start from the 'naturalistic' style of the 'Venus of Macomer' and, even more so, of the 'steatopy' figurines found in necropolises pertaining to the Culture of Bonu Ighinu; we then move on to the figurines in the 'cruciform' style, pertinent to the Culture of Ozieri and we arrive at the 'perforated' figures of the Eneolithic.

Update

9/9/2023 - 14:28