Even 29,500 years ago, breasts were a big thing—as we know from the Venus of Willendorf, a sculpture dug up in 1908 at a Paleolithic site in lower Austria. Historians believe such female figurines—busty little artworks—were fertility totems and mother goddesses. An exhibition at Palazzo Franchetti brings together more recent works in which breasts are accentuated by artists (among them, Salvador Dalí and Irving Penn, Marcel Duchamp and Cindy Sherman). The variety of this imagery suggests the complicated realities of womanhood, wherein the breast symbolizes the idealized mother, fetishized flesh, and everything in between. —Clara Molot