Sculpture/Rodin
Rodin’s
The Thinker is arguably one of the
most recognizable sculptures of our time. The sculpture and the pose have been
copied and used so often in pop culture that, personally, I was aware of The Thinker long before I knew of Rodin,
Dante, or The Gates of Hell. As the
video showed The Gates of Hell is not
only a monumental work of art it’s also the story of Rodin’s career and the evolution
of sculpture itself.
Rodin
was originally asked to design a work for a museum in Paris, a museum that
never saw completion, and so Rodin spent a good part of his life working and
reworking the figures that would go upon the door and the door itself. Rodin
was inspired by Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze door on Florence’s Baptistery of San
Giovanni, which Michelangelo had dubbed the Gates
of Paradise. He was also inspired by much of Michelangelo’s work, especially
his work The Last Judgment. The Gates of Hell is, at least in part,
a depiction of Dante’s great work The
Divine Comedy, with a number of prominent characters from that work
depicted on the door. Dante himself is represented in the pensive figure
sitting on the lentil of the door, later known as The Thinker; Rodin depicts Dante nude and in great concentration,
intent on the creative process, which was a departure from how Dante was
typically depicted in art. Depicting Dante in a not readily identifiable way
allowed Rodin to make him a symbol for all creators, his entire body gripped
with the desire to create; in fact with the in-the-round molding of the figure
and it’s placement on the door it’s easy to read a god-like, or Christ-like,
meaning in his character. As the museum the doors were meant for never came to
be Rodin began exhibiting individual pieces from the door, worked in wax and
then cast in bronze, both in the size they had originally been made and in
larger versions. It’s the larger version of The
Thinker that most of us are familiar with these days.
The
doors themselves are a marvel as Rodin combines low-relief, high-relief, and
in-the-round figures to give the doors a sense of feeling and movement. He has
highly detailed pieces combined with almost abstract shapes that seem to melt
into, or rise out of, the doors themselves; this was a departure from the
mostly representational works of sculpture in Rodin’s day. Some of his figures
lacked hands, or heads, or other body parts that were not needed for what Rodin
wanted them to depict. When Rodin exhibited his door in 1900, at this point
still in wax, he intentionally removed most of the in-the-round sculptures from
it, leaving an abstract door with reliefs and shapes that allowed for greater
play of light and shadows upon it. This abstract, seemingly unfinished, piece became
known as one of the first abstract works of sculpture.
It’s
interesting to me that many of Rodin’s most famous works and his foray into
abstract sculpture came about because of the failure of the museum for which
his Gates of Hell were originally
intended. I wonder had the museum opened as scheduled, would The Thinker be the famous, easily
recognizable work of art that it is today.
http://www.youtube.com/user/canaleducatif?feature=watch
(BlackBoard video)
