Paul Hurault, 8th Marquis de Vibraye (1809–1878) was an amateur archaeologist from

France France (), officially the French Republic ( ), is a country primarily located in Western Europe. It also comprises of overseas regions and territories in the Americas and the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Its metropolitan area ...

. He was born Guillaume-Paul Louis Maximilien Hurault, son of a notable politician and military officer . He discovered the very first Paleolithic sculptural representation of a woman discovered in modern times. It was found in about 1864 by at the famous archaeological site of

Laugerie-Basse Laugerie-Basse is an important Upper Paleolithic archaeological site within the territory of the French commune Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil in Dordogne. It is known for several works of art from the Magdalenian. In 1979, Laugerie-Basse, along ...

in the

Vézère The Vézère (; oc, Vesera) is a 211-km-long river in southwestern France. It is an important tributary to the Dordogne. Its source is in the northwestern part of the elevated plateau known as the Massif Central. It flows into the Dordogne near ...

valley (one of the many important Stone Age sites in and around the commune of

Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil Les Eyzies-de-Tayac-Sireuil (; oc, Las Aisiás de Taiac e Siruèlh) is a former commune in the Dordogne department in Nouvelle-Aquitaine in southwestern France. On 1 January 2019, it was merged into the new commune Les Eyzies.Dordogne Dordogne ( , or ; ; oc, Dordonha ) is a large rural department in Southwestern France, with its prefecture in Périgueux. Located in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region roughly half-way between the Loire Valley and the Pyrenees, it is name ...

, southwestern

). The Magdalenian "Venus" from Laugerie-Basse is headless, footless, armless but with a strongly incised vaginal opening. De Vibraye named it '' La Vénus impudique'' or ''Venus Impudica'' ("immodest Venus"), contrasting it to the '' Venus Pudica'',

Hellenistic In Classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Mediterranean history after Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the emergence of the Roman Empire, as signified by the Battle of Actium in ...

sculpture by

Praxiteles Praxiteles (; el, Πραξιτέλης) of Athens, the son of Cephisodotus the Elder, was the most renowned of the Attica sculptors of the 4th century BC. He was the first to sculpt the nude female form in a life-size statue. While no indubita ...

showing

Aphrodite Aphrodite ( ; grc-gre, Ἀφροδίτη, Aphrodítē; , , ) is an ancient Greek goddess associated with love, lust, beauty, pleasure, passion, and procreation. She was syncretized with the Roman goddess . Aphrodite's major symbols inclu ...

covering her naked pubis with her right hand. It is from this name that we get the term "

Venus figurines A Venus figurine is any Upper Palaeolithic statuette portraying a woman, usually carved in the round.Fagan, Brian M., Beck, Charlotte, "Venus Figurines", ''The Oxford Companion to Archaeology'', 1996, Oxford University Press, pp. 740–741 Most ...

" commonly used for Stone Age sculptures of this kind.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vibraye, Paul Hurault, 8th Marquis de 1809 births 1878 deaths French archaeologists