By Walter Ego
It could seem a little odd to highlight as the event of the month the exhibition of a French artist on a newsletter primarily concerned with Italian art. And until few months ago I would have myself thought the same if I did not come across a book: Rodin – the Hands of a Genius.
What has struck me in this book was not only the great art and ability of the artist, but also that the “Inferno” by Dante was his only night-reading for years and, above all, his favourite. One of his works, La Porte de l’Infer – The Door of Hell – recalls Dante’s Inferno image of Hell and many of his works among whose Le Penseur – The Thinker – in the picture besides, were born out of some of the incredible sculptures that compose “The Door”. And this “Door” seemed to never close for Rodin, who worked incessantly for 20 years on more than 200 figures that compose the work, without ever declaring himself satisfied with his work. In the end, it was Léonce Bénédite, the first director of the Rodin Museum, who finished the work of the artist re-assembling the ultimate version that we can today admire.
It is “The Door of Hell”, positioned in the patio of the Royal Academy of Arts that welcomes the visitors to the exhibition. This is Rodin’s tribute to the literary mastery of Dante, whose images are honoured by a series of sculpted bodies that clash against each other and are fixed in contortions like animals devouring each other while, as a unique living organism, they precipitate in the eternal abyss.
The exhibition shows the best of Rodin’s creation: The Man with the Broken Nose firstly displayed at the Ècole des Beaux-Arts in Paris – school that for three times had refused to admit Rodin as a student; The Age of Bronze, statue that inaugurated the myth of Rodin as a sculptor; and Saint John the Baptist, whose model was a farmer from Abruzzo that one day knocked on Rodin’s door offering to pose for one of his sculptures. We can then admire The Calais Bourgeois, a magnificent historical representation composed of six statues that Rodin sculptured separately to be able to change their position around; and then Balzac, a sculpture that was disliked by many of Rodin’s contemporaries, but ultimately loved by Mallarmé and Monet.
I would like to conclude with the description of two of the most famous sculptures by Rodin, The Kiss and The Thinker, which are both displayed in an empty room. The reason is not only to be found in their dimensions, but also in the aesthetic trance that the two works provoke to the spectator when seen in 360 degrees. The spectator can only be struck by Rodin’s ability to transform marble into a living thing.
The kiss between the two lovers is lightly designed, yet it is possible to see it, feel it, in the bodies of the lovers, who seemed to be animated by shivers of passion.
The Thinker – maybe Dante, maybe Rodin himself? – is, instead, lost in deep contemplation and as Rilke commented “... it seems that his entire body had become head, while his blood all brain”.
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