Pregnancy in art

Pregnancy in art covers any artistic work that portrays pregnancy in women. It may include drawings, engravings, paintings, portraits, photographs, sculptures and figurines. In art as in life, it is often unclear whether an actual state of pregnancy is intended to be shown. Historically, married women were at some stage of pregnancy for much of their life until the menopause, but the depiction of this in art is relatively uncommon, and generally restricted to some specific contexts. This probably persists even in contemporary culture; despite several recent artworks depicting heavily pregnant women, one writer was "astonished at the shortage of visual images ... of pregnant women in public visual culture".

There are two subjects often depicted in Western narrative art, or history painting, where pregnancy is an important part of the story. These are the unhappy scene usually called Diana and Callisto, showing the moment of discovery of Callisto's forbidden pregnancy, and the biblical scene of the Visitation. Gradually, portraits of pregnant women began to appear, with a particular fashion for "pregnancy portraits" in elite portraiture of the years around 1600.

As well as being a subject for depiction in art, pregnant women were also consumers of art, with some special types of work developed for them.

Images, especially small figurines of pregnant women were made in traditional cultures in many places and periods, though it is rarely one of the most common types of image. These include ceramic figures from some Pre-Columbian cultures, and a few figures from most of the ancient Mediterranean cultures. Many of these seem to be connected with fertility.

Among the oldest surviving examples of the depiction of pregnancy are prehistoric figurines found across much of Eurasia and collectively known as Venus figurines. The best known is the Venus of Willendorf, an oolitic limestone figurine of a woman whose breasts and hips have been exaggerated to emphasise her fertility. These figurines exaggerate the abdomen, hips, breasts, thighs, or vulva of the subject, but the degree to which the figures appear to be pregnant varies considerably, and most are not noticeably pregnant at all. An inevitably subjective survey of the corpus of about 140 figurines concluded that only 17% of them represented pregnant women, extending to 39% "which could possibly represent pregnancy".

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