The figurine was found on 7 August 1908 by labourer Johann Veran during railway construction near the Lower Austrian village of Willendorf, alongside the Danube; the archaeologist Josef Szombathy recognised its significance on the spot. The eleven-centimetre body — pronounced breasts, broad hips, no face, a head wrapped in what may be a braided cap or sculpted hair — has since become the most recognisable image of European prehistory.

The oolitic limestone she is carved from does not occur near Willendorf. The closest plausible source lies hundreds of kilometres away, in the region around northern Italy. Either the raw block or the finished figure travelled — evidence of contact networks between Upper Paleolithic communities that were once assumed to be largely isolated. Traces of red ochre cover the surface and are still visible to the naked eye.

What she meant has been contested for over a century. The "fertility goddess" reading dominated the early twentieth century, but caution prevails today: she may be a self-portrait carved from a high vantage looking down, a depiction of an ancestor, a ritual object, or a personal charm. Even the name "Venus" is anachronistic — a nineteenth-century projection of classical antiquity onto something that predates antiquity by nearly thirty millennia.

The figurine is on permanent display in a dedicated case at the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, where she is one of the institution's most-visited single objects.