Standing at the Gates

The success of Rodin’s academic sculptures expanded his reputation as an artist, and, after his St. John the Baptist Preaching had gained acceptance into the Salon in 1880, Rodin was approached with a commission for a monumental door in the style of Ghiberti’s fifteenth century The Gates of Paradise (Lampert, 45). Rodin accepted this commission in part due to the great honor it bestowed upon him, but also in large part due to the freedom they gave him regarding its theme - as Rodin said, “they left to me the choice of my subject.” (qtd. Elsen, 155) As an avid reader of Dante - Rodin was known to carry The Divine Comedy in his pocket (Masson, 30) - his choice was a relatively straightforward one; his theme would be Dante’s Inferno, and the door he would execute would be called The Gates of Hell (right).

Rodin, after accepting the commission for The Gates of Hell, confessed that he wanted to “illustrate the moving details” of Dante’s poem (Lampert 45), and translate the words of Dante into “moments of sculptural expressiveness” (Masson, 30). In an effort to capture these ‘moments’ and their ‘movements,’ Rodin would at first rely on the classical, academic instruction he was brought up with and excelled at. He would turn therefore, to a familiar source of inspiration while in the early stages of his development of The Gates of Hell: Rodin, still fresh off of his 1875 trip to Florence to study the classical greats - and primarily Michelangelo, whom he greatly admired - would begin to apply much of the Florentine’s classical style to the monumental portal.

We can see this classical influence when comparing some of the figures in The Gates of Hell with those done by Michelangelo centuries earlier. In his Adam, for instance, Rodin seems to have sculpted the three-dimensional incarnation of Michelangelo’s Adam in The Birth of Adam. The exaggerated, muscular body, the acutely bent posture, and the hand reaching out with its fingertips all hearken to the Michelangelo’s nascent figure awaiting the touch of God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. In fact, Albert Elsen writes in Rodin’s Art that of all of Rodin’s works Adam is the most similar to both “the sculpture of early Michelangelo and contemporary French salons” (Elsen, 185). That Rodin so strikingly emulates Michelangelo says much about his mindset at this relatively early time in his career: as the first exhibited work for The Gates of Hell, and actually created a year before his St. John the Baptist Preaching (Elsen, 182), Rodin’s Adam reveals an artist that had not yet begun to drift away from the classical manner and academic style that was the status quo for sculpture at the time.

This at first seems to be true as well with Rodin’s The Thinker (left), a portrayal of Dante in a rather contemplative state of mind. Arguably the most well-known sculpture in the world, The Thinker actually borrows much from the work of Michelangelo, and more specifically from his Il Penseroso (right). Michelangelo’s depiction of the esteemed patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici, not only shares its title with Rodin’s future work (Il Penseroso translates to “The Thinker”), but provided many stylistic influences as well. The seated pose and the hand on the chin in a thoughtful gesture are the most obvious similarities between the two works, and begin to demonstrate how Rodin wished to approach his work on The Gates of Hell: as an academic sculpture befitting the legacy of the classical greats. However, with The Thinker we can also begin to see that Rodin’s work on The Age of Bronze and St. John the Baptist Preaching had started to effect his figures’ poses. Here, Rodin’s focus on a dynamic aspect to The Thinker’s pose had made him cross the seated man’s right arm - intentionally bringing in an exaggerated contraposto effect - while also bringing the man forward and tensing the whole of his body. This then stands in contrast to Michelangelo’s Il Penseroso, whose figures ruminates leaning back in a relaxed manner. As well, after The Burghers of Calais, Rodin went through a changing interpretation of the figure, refusing to represent the man as Dante, instead “demythologiz[ing]” the figure (Tancock, 112) and leaving him an unidentified individual - a departure from the academic tradition.

This departure seems to have been paralleled in Rodin’s work on the whole of The Gates of Hell. The swift pace he had worked at the four years prior to The Burghers of Calais to imbue the monumental portal with images seemingly ripped straight from the pages of Dante’s work had slowed down considerably, and a new attitude towards the sculpture was being exhibited by Rodin. As he increasingly found himself without the “desire or gift for the profound interpretative thinking of Dante,” the figures for Rodin’s The Gates of Hell were becoming “deliberately impressionistic and provisional” (Lampert, 74). This ‘deliberate’ move away from classic figures and more towards impressionistic ones was perhaps fueled by his work on The Burghers of Calais and the confidence that the sculpture gave to Rodin in regards to experimentation of his figures’ poses. However, though he had begun to break away from academic tradition, Rodin would never be truly satisfied in his application of these impressionistic, ‘provisional’ figures to his work on The Gates of Hell, and would struggle with the sculpture for a great part of his life.

The Gates of Hell can thus be observed as an autobiographical work of sorts. Rodin’s years of work on these portals would spawn countless figures of their own right - including some his most famous works, like The Thinker, The Kiss, Ugolino and his Children, The Three Shades, Adam, and Eve - but Rodin, juggling multiple commissions and works at the same time, would never completely finish the portal in his lifetime (nor would the French government ever finish the museum the decorative door was to be for). He would curiously enough, actually quit working on The Gates of Hell altogether in 1900 (Elsen, 155) - perhaps a sign of his dissatisfaction with the work’s theme. Thus we can see via The Gates of Hell that Rodin’s once intense interest in literary and classical themes waned as the years went on and his career progressed; Rodin, near the turn of the century, seemed to have lost much of the enthusiasm for such subjects as those depicted in The Gates of Hell that he had had earlier in his career. While perhaps not the sole reason for this loss of passion, his newfound focus on Impressionism and dynamic poses - especially after his work on The Burghers of Calais - marked a shift in his attitude regarding The Gates of Hell and other such works, and would ultimately facilitate his move away from the academic and classical subjects that had, until then, dominated his oeuvre.