In 1880 the French state gave the sculptor Auguste Rodin, then 40 and trailing a curious notoriety — critics had accused him of faking his breakthrough figure, The Age of Bronze, by casting it directly from a living model, so uncannily lifelike was it — what looked like a routine job: a pair of monumental bronze doors for a planned Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. The commission was, in part, official rehabilitation: no one could cast a door of two hundred writhing figures from life. The museum was never built. The doors were never finished, never cast and never delivered in his lifetime. And yet that phantom commission became the central project of Rodin's existence — he worked on The Gates of Hell, on and off, for 37 years until his death in 1917 — and its most famous tenant escaped to become the best-known sculpture in the world.
Rodin chose Dante's Inferno as his subject and set about modelling a swarming portal of the damned: more than 180 figures writhing across six metres of plaster. At the top centre, in the tympanum where a Last Judgement would put Christ, he placed a seated nude man, about 70 centimetres high, chin on hand, gazing down at the maelstrom. Rodin called him The Poet: he was Dante, conceiving the poem — but a Dante stripped of robe, book and laurels, because Rodin wanted a universal creator rather than a costumed portrait. The figure borrowed openly from tradition's great brooders, Michelangelo's Il Pensieroso among them, and from Carpeaux's Ugolino; his neighbours on the doors included two lovers from the second circle of Hell whose embrace, judged too joyful for damnation, was removed and exhibited separately — becoming The Kiss.
The escape from the Gates
Rodin treated the Gates as a quarry, promoting figures from them into independent works throughout his career; when he mounted his great one-man pavilion at the Paris Exposition of 1900, he showed the Gates in plaster, tellingly stripped of many figures — a door forever under construction. Around 1902–04 his enlargement specialist Henri Lebossé scaled the little Poet up to over life size using a pantograph-like machine. Exhibited in 1904 under the title that a public had already given it — Le Penseur, The Thinker — the monumental version caused a sensation, and a public subscription placed a bronze outside the Panthéon in 1906, where the nude everyman was celebrated and denounced as a socialist icon of labour's dignity. In 1922 that cast was moved to the gardens of the Hôtel Biron, the Paris mansion Rodin had bequeathed to the nation as the Musée Rodin. The multiplication has never stopped: because bronzes are cast, not carved, more than twenty monumental Thinkers now brood in cities from Philadelphia to Buenos Aires to Tokyo — French law today limits an "original" edition to twelve casts — and none is the single true Thinker, a trick question quizmasters adore. The most personal cast of all sits above the grave of Rodin and his lifelong companion Rose Beuret at Meudon: the Thinker as headstone.
Bombs, meanings and the unfinished door
What is he thinking about? Rodin's own gloss, given to a journalist in 1904, was that his thinker thinks not only with his brain, knitted brow and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes — thought as a whole-body labour, a workman's activity rather than a scholar's. The image's fame has drawn the inevitable violence of symbols: in March 1970 the cast outside the Cleveland Museum of Art was dynamited in the night, an attack attributed to radical bombers and never solved; the museum chose to display the wreck unrepaired, legs blown open, as a document of its time. The Gates of Hell themselves were finally cast in bronze only after Rodin's death — casts now stand in Paris, Philadelphia, Tokyo and elsewhere — so the modern visitor can finally see what the nineteenth century never did: the original little Thinker in situ, still bent over the catastrophe unfolding below, the doorkeeper of a museum that never existed, patron saint of unfinished business, whose original day job the world forgot the moment he stood up and stepped out alone.
Quiz nuggets
- The Thinker began around 1880 as The Poet — a 70cm figure of Dante on the tympanum of Rodin's Gates of Hell.
- The Gates were commissioned for a Paris decorative-arts museum that was never built, and were not cast in bronze in Rodin's lifetime.
- Henri Lebossé enlarged the figure in 1902–04; a cast stood outside the Panthéon from 1906 until moving to the Musée Rodin in 1922.
- More than twenty monumental casts exist; The Kiss also originated on the Gates as Dante's damned lovers Paolo and Francesca.
- A Thinker marks Rodin's grave at Meudon; Cleveland's cast, bombed in 1970, is displayed unrepaired.