“The science of modelling was taught me by one Constant, who worked in the atelier where I made my début as a sculptor. One day, watching me model a capital ornamented with foliage—‘Rodin,’ he said to me, ‘you are going about that in the wrong way. All your leaves are seen flat. That is why they do not look real. Make some with the tips pointed at you, so that, in seeing them, one has the sensation of depth.’ I followed his advice and I was astounded at the result that I obtained. ‘Always remember what I am about to tell you,’ went on Constant. ‘Henceforth, when you carve, never see the form in length, but always in thickness. Never consider a surface except as the extremity of a volume, as the point, more or less large, which it directs towards you. In that way you will acquire the science of modelling.’
Crouching Venus
“This principle was astonishingly fruitful to me. I applied it to the execution of figures. Instead of imagining the different parts of a body as surfaces more or less flat, I represented them as projectures of interior volumes. I forced myself to express in each swelling of the torso or of the limbs the efflorescence of a muscle or of a bone which lay deep beneath the skin. And so the truth of my figures, instead of being merely superficial, seems to blossom from within to the outside, like life itself.
“Now I have discovered that the ancients practised precisely this method of modelling. And it is certainly to this technique that their works owe at once their vigor and their palpitating suppleness.”
Rodin contemplated afresh his exquisite Greek Venus. And suddenly he said:
“In your opinion, Gsell, is color a quality of painting or of sculpture?”
“Of painting, naturally.”
“Well, then, just look at this statue.”
So saying, he raised the lamp as high as he could in order to light the antique torso from above.