@ARTICLE{10.21494/ISTE.OP.2022.0892, TITLE={The road of bifurcating paths in the prehistoric representation of the female body: the appearance of geometrization and the conservation of roundness}, AUTHOR={Ernesto Di Mauro, }, JOURNAL={Art and Science}, VOLUME={6}, NUMBER={Issue 4}, YEAR={2022}, URL={https://www.openscience.fr/The-road-of-bifurcating-paths-in-the-prehistoric-representation-of-the-female}, DOI={10.21494/ISTE.OP.2022.0892}, ISSN={2515-8767}, ABSTRACT={The Venuses of Paleolithic and Neolithic arts are magnificent. They represent a "first time" for men to express their vision of the female body. They were representations without all the filters that the culture would have imposed on them later. Tracing the evolution of these images back to us allows us to penetrate a unitary thought where sex, the mystery of life and the throes of reproduction have long been confused in sophisticated simplicity. Sometimes the way of representing this unitary mystery changed and was expressed according to different codes. Can these codes provide a key to these distant minds? A little-studied example is the appearance around the beginning of the 3rd millennium B.C., in cultures distant from each other but all Mediterranean, of distinctly geometric forms. Sometimes geometry and opulence of forms coexisted, sometimes not. Tracing the evolution of these codes of representation is partly possible. An underestimated problem concerns the evaluation of the approach used to interpret these codes. A brief discussion of recent ways of approaching the description of literary and artistic reality can help us focus on this topic.}}