Dreams in Stone

It is so easy to just pass by Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, dwarfed by the PMA looming so close by. Set back from the traffic surging down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Rodin Museum stands as an oasis from the hustle and bustle of urban life. Born November 12, 1840, Auguste Rodin took the course of nineteenth century sculpture and set it back hundreds of years in order to send it soaring into the future. Works such as Rodin’s The Age of Bronze (above, 1876) harked back to classical sculpture as well as to Rodin’s heroes, Michelangelo and Donatello. The anatomic accuracy of The Age of Bronze led some to accuse Rodin of cheating by simply casting around the live model. Rodin, of course, didn’t need to cheat, but the physical realism of the figure seems almost unimportant beside the psychological realism of the pose. Rodin patterned The Age of Bronze after Michelangelo's Dying Slave. Both sculptures show a figure at the moment of ecstasy, whether the release of death, of sex, or both. Rodin recognized the eroticism embedded in Renaissance sculpture and secularized it for a modern audience. So many artists overreach in tapping the dramatic, but Rodin always seems to be pitch perfect in sculpting human emotion at its peak.

I read years ago an article by a psychologist arguing that Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais (above, from 1889) illustrates all Five Stages of Grief. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross formulated her model of grief seventy years after Rodin sculpted his Burghers, but you can persuasively argue that Rodin knew enough psychology simply by studying human nature that he approximated the stages pretty well. The Burghers tells the story of six men who sacrificed themselves during the Hundred Years' War to save the people of Calais from destruction at the hands of King Edward III’s army. Fortunately, Edward’s queen, Philippa of Hainault, pleaded on their behalf to the king, who spared their lives. Rodin shows the sestet walking to their doom and still believing they are about to die. Few emotions strike so deeply to the heart of who we are as the anticipation of death. In The Burghers of Calais, Rodin prepares each one of us to meet our maker through the example of the torments of even these brave men of history.


I’ve always thought of Rodin’s finest figures as dancers. Sure, The Thinker remains the poster boy for immobility and The Kiss is the romance after the dance, but works such as I Am Beautiful (above, from 1882) look like a scene from a ballet or a contemporary dance piece to me. I Am Beautiful actually belongs to the suite of sculptures comprising the gigantic whole of Rodin’s Gates of Hell, the pandemonium over which The Thinker muses. The male figure lifts the woman up as if to show the world just how beautiful she is, at least in his eyes. Rodin stole the title from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Je suis belle” in Les Fleurs du mal:

I am beautiful, O mortals! Like a dream in stone,
And my breast, upon which each is bruised in turn,
Inspires in a poet love silent and eternal
Like that of the material clay flesh and bronze bone.

For a man who treated women so horribly (such as the sculptor Camille Claudel), Rodin knew how to depict human relationships of every shade, from tender to almost destructively passionate. For me, every work by Rodin seems “a dream in stone” where inanimate materials seem as alive as flesh and bone.

For Young Lovers

One of the great joys of walking up the Benjamin Franklin Parkway towards the Philadelphia Museum of Art is passing by Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker outside the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia. The Thinker muses upon the mass of humanity and traffic passing by through all the seasons. (The snowbound Thinker always amuses me. A snow globe from the Rodin Museum allows me to winterize him anytime.) Born November 12, 1840, Rodin created some of the most enduring sculptures in modern history, such as The Kiss (above, from 1901-4). The fascinating thing about The Kiss is that their lips aren’t actually touching. The woman’s shoulder hides the fact that their lips never truly meet. I’ve read somewhere that there is no angle from which you can actually photograph their lips—perhaps a sign that Rodin wanted to keep that intimacy private.

Like Virginia, Rodin is for lovers. So many of his images show men and women locked together in an embrace, such as his Eternal Spring (above; also known as Eternal Springtime; modeled 1881, marble executed 1906–7). Some of those embraces seem more like life and death struggles. Works such as I Am Beautiful, Possession, Shame (Absolution), and Youth Triumphant show relationships from every angle. Sadly, Rodin himself couldn’t build a lasting relationship, choosing instead a life of philandering. Once, when his wife confronted him about his latest affair, Rodin picked up a piece of clay and began to mold it, never taking his eyes off of her as she berated him. When she finally stopped for air, Rodin lifted the work in his hands and said to her, “This is what you look like when you’re mad.” Perhaps the Mask of Madame Rodin came from that exchange. The sculptor Camille Claudel, with whom Rodin had a tempestuous affair, never looks too happy, either.

While making life a hell for the women in his life, Rodin worked on his conception of the underworld in his epic construction, The Gates of Hell (above, from 1880-1917). So many pieces of The Gates of Hell took on lives of their own as individual masterpieces, especially The Thinker, who sits atop the gates and ponders the suffering beneath. The Kiss was originally intended to represent Dante’s doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca but was removed from the final conception. In The Gates of Hell, Rodin challenges Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment for the last word on the apocalypse. Michelangelo’s art haunted Rodin, a subject the PMA explored in a 1997 exhibition, the catalogue for which, Rodin and Michelangelo: A Study in Artistic Inspiration, I still keep handy. Rodin’s Mask of the Man With a Broken Nose is a attempt at a portrait of Michelangelo, who allegedly had his nose broken by another artist that he had criticized. In The Gates of Hell and other works, including The Age of Bronze, Torso of a Man, and The Walking Man, Rodin confronts Michelangelo and the whole Renaissance, breathing new life into those forms for the modern world.

I have so many favorite sculptures that Rodin, as must be obvious from all the works I’ve linked to. Limiting myself to just a few images was hard, but I couldn’t resist showing Rodin’s Bust of Gustav Mahler (above, from 1909), which captures all the pathos and weariness of the dying great composer. Rodin’s sculpture portraits vary in mood so beautifully, somber at one moment for Mahler and then almost comic at another for the great novelist Honore de Balzac, who is actually sculpted naked beneath the great enveloping cloak. Rodin envelops all his works with his unique charm and bold, passionate humanity, towering over all other modern sculptors and rising to the ranks of the Renaissance greats.