“Now examine the body. It must have been slightly bent toward the left at the moment when it performed the act which I have described, but here it is erect, here is the chest thrown out, here is the head turning towards the soldiers as it roars out the order to attack; here, finally, is the right arm raised and brandishing the sabre.
“So there you have a confirmation of what I have just said; the movement in this statue is only the change from a first attitude—that which the Marshal had as he drew his sabre—into a second, that which he had as he rushes, arm aloft, upon the enemy.
Marshal Ney
By Rude
“In that is all the secret of movement as interpreted by art. The sculptor compels, so to speak, the spectator to follow the development of an act in an individual. In the example that we have chosen, the eyes are forced to travel upward from the lower limbs to the raised arm, and, as in so doing they find the different parts of the figure represented at successive instants, they have the illusion of beholding the movement performed.”
As it happened, the casts of the Iron Age and of Saint John the Baptist stood in the great hall where we were. Rodin asked me to look at them. And I at once recognized the truth of his words.
I noticed that in the first of these works the movement appears to mount, as in the statue of Ney. The legs of the youth, who is not yet fully awake, are still lax and almost vacillating, but as your eye mounts you see the pose become firmer—the ribs rise beneath the skin, the chest expands, the face is lifted towards the sky, and the two arms stretch in an endeavor to throw off their torpor.
The subject of this sculpture is exactly that—the passage from somnolence to the vigor of the being ready for action.
This slow gesture of awakening appears, besides, still more grand when one understands its symbolic meaning. For it represents, as the title of the work indicates, the first palpitation of conscience in a humanity still young, the first victory of reason over the brutishness of the prehistoric ages.
In the same way I next studied Saint John. And I saw that the rhythm of this figure led, as Rodin had said, to a sort of evolution between two balances. The figure leaning, at first, all its weight upon the left foot, which presses the ground with all its strength, seems to balance there while the eyes look to the right. You then see all the body bent in that direction, then the right leg advances and the foot takes hold of the ground. At the same time the left shoulder, which is raised, seems to endeavor to bring the weight of the body to this side in order to aid the leg which is behind to come forward. Now, the science of the sculptor has consisted precisely in imposing all these facts upon the spectator in the order in which I have stated them, so that their succession will give the impression of movement.