As you steady yourself for the Holidays, a supermarket carol on your lips and maybe (but hopefully not) a pink slip in your pocket, plan to visit the Brooklyn Museum. Plan to be cheered, inestimably. As of today, the museum is exhibiting its well-known Female Figurine, a five-inch tall clay lady dating to Mesopotamia in the fifth millennium BC (Before Christmas?).
Votive? Fertility goddess? Marital aide? Scholars aren’t entirely sure what She is, or what She did, seeing as She was made a long time ago, back when people were still taste-testing mud as a daily source of vitamins, and holidays, such as they were, we’re earthy.
All we know of the seriously curvy lady, whose thighs are undoubtedly the fattest in all of Art History, and thousands like her, is that She played some kind of important role in Mesopotamian culture. Maybe she made the rivers flood, or the food arrive, thereby earning the thanks of a pre-Bronze age people who gave no thought to investing their gods with–what’s the word?–sex appeal.