When finished, the “Gate of Hell” is to be of bronze, and it will be executed in high relief after Ghiberti’s model. At present it consists of a two-leaved door, with a frieze, a tympanum, and two lateral columns. In the panels and upon the wide uprights are a multitude of figures—perhaps 100—also in high relief. The whole gate will be at least twenty feet high. Crowning the whole design will be the famous figure of the “[Thinker].”
As in the case of “[The Kiss],” Rodin has translated the “[Thinker]” into a larger size, and the replica now stands in front of the steps of the Pantheon. The nude figure rests his right arm on his left knee, the hand supporting the chin of the dreamer. In the “[Thinker]” we may see the father of men, uncultured and uncouth, brooding over the mad doings of his children. These roll below in the panels and framework of the gate, the victims of all the passions to which mankind is heir.
AUGUSTE RODIN
“THE KISS” (LE BAISER)
Luxembourg, Paris
There is no affectation in reading a profound philosophy into the sculptures of such an artist as Rodin. The nature of the greatest art is such that profundity of thought cannot be divorced from a supreme work. He is not a conscious preacher and moralist. But he is impelled to bear witness to the eternal verities which manifest themselves in nature in the form of beauty. A Turner feels their message in the light and colour of the sky and sea, a Correggio in the glint of the hair or the soft skin of a woman. A sculptor like Rodin gazes upon a well-shaped throat, follows the lines of a well-poised trunk or the bend of a strong man’s loins, and cries, with John Addington Symonds:
“I know not anything more fair than thou.— God give me strength to feel thee, power to speak Through this dumb clay and marble all the thoughts That rise within my spirit while I gaze!— What saith the Scripture? ‘In His image God Shaped man, and breathed into his nostrils breath Of life.’—Here then, as nowhere else, shines God; The Thought made flesh, the world’s soul breathing soft And strong, not merely through those lips and eyes, But in each flawless limb, each mighty curve, Each sinew moulded on the moving form.”
With such a belief Rodin, naturally, rarely drapes his figures. He holds that not only the head and the hand, but every part of the body, expresses human emotion. Again he says: “I never give my model a pose. It is my habit to let them wander about the studio as they will. They rest or move as their mood may dictate. I thus become familiar with every natural, unforced movement of the human body.” In his “St. John the Baptist,” Rodin worked from a model who had never posed before. Before he commenced, he asked the man to raise his arm and begin walking. A moment later he cried: “There now, stop.” The result was a statue organically true, and showing a fine spontaneity which is in the strongest contrast to the highly conventionalized figures of the academics.
Finally, Rodin’s technique and, particularly, the quality in his modelling which has earned him the title of the “First of the Impressionist Sculptors.”