Breast is an eternal quintessential symbol of the female. An icon to symbolize a cluster of perceptions like beauty, fertility, power, dominion, status, feeding and idolize warriors, priestesses and goddesses. Since the early bronze age until the Hellenistic period art, divine and wealth shaped a plethora of figurines, statues, sculptures and pottery to celebrate breasts. Normality, peculiarity, intended augmentation, absence, disease, were all depicted. Enlarged breasts became in prehistory the emblematic depiction of the fertile goddess “Venus”, while later on during the classical era symbolized the phenomenal elegance of Aphrodite (symbolized Roman counterpart Venus). Ex-votos had been gifted to the gods for health promotion in periods of theurgic medicine. Since the Hippocratics breasts entered true medicine as an organ to feed or suffer a disease. Religion, social beliefs, culture, attraction, lust, filled the desire and promoted vigorous passion for the artists of the past to shape in the Greek world the paramount pictograph of the female body.
Keywords: votive offerings, figurines, Venus, Aphrodite, mastos.
Full text sources https://doi.org/10.31688/ABMU.2025.60.1.16
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Gregory TSOUCALAS
Address: School of Medicine, Voutes, Heraklion, 71003 PC, Greece
E-mail: gregorytsoukalas@uoc.gr
