“As you take me for a sorcerer,” Rodin answered, “I shall try to do justice to my reputation by accomplishing a task much more difficult for me than animating bronze—that of explaining how I do it.
“Note, first, that movement is the transition from one attitude to another.
“This simple statement, which has the air of a truism, is, to tell the truth, the key to the mystery.
“You have certainly read in Ovid how Daphne was transformed into a bay-tree and Progne into a swallow. This charming writer shows us the body of the one taking on its covering of leaves and bark and the members of the other clothing themselves in feathers, so that in each of them one still sees the woman which will cease to be and the tree or bird which she will become. You remember, too, how in Dante’s Inferno a serpent, coiling itself about the body of one of the damned, changes into man as the man becomes reptile. The great poet describes this scene so ingeniously that in each of these two beings one follows the struggle between two natures which progressively invade and supplant each other.
The Tempest
By Rodin
Photograph reproduced by permission of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
“It is, in short, a metamorphosis of this kind that the painter or the sculptor effects in giving movement to his personages. He represents the transition from one pose to another—he indicates how insensibly the first glides into the second. In his work we still see a part of what was and we discover a part of what is to be. An example will enlighten you better.
“You mentioned just now the statue of Marshal Ney by Rude. Do you recall the figure clearly?”
“Yes,” I said. “The hero raises his sword, shouting ‘Forward’ to his troops at the top of his voice.”
“Exactly! Well—when you next pass that statue, look at it still more closely. You will then notice this: the legs of the statue and the hand which holds the sheath of the sabre are placed in the attitude that they had when he drew—the left leg is drawn back so that the sabre may be easily grasped by the right hand, which has just drawn it; and as for the left hand, it is arrested in the air as if still offering the sheath.