Rodin, The Thinker, initial analysis

Auguste Rodin initial analysis Rodin would often complete preliminary sketches and The Thinker models, then leave the 1881-1903, bronze, carving of the full size marble 180 x 98 x 145 cm or plaster cast for a mould to (71 x 39 x 57”) one of his assistants. Cast made by Fonderie Eventually, the artist would Alexis Rudier in 1904. take control of the work to Transfered to Musée Rodin add finishing touches and in 1922. make sure that the piece fitted his exacting standards. This process is how The Thinker would have been developed. When conceived in 1880 There is a particularity in the The Thinker was entitled The composition to The Gates, Poet. He represented Dante, notably in the placement of author of the Comedy [Divine the larger figures. The Comedy] which had inspired monumental Adam and Eve, The Gates of Hell. The Thinker freestanding before The Gates, was the crowning element form the base of a pyramid, of The Gates, seated on the at the zenith of which stand tympanum, leaning forward The Three Shades and, directly to observe the circles of below them, The Thinker. This Hell. arrangement focuses the viewer’s attention on the complex of reliefs adorning the Gates.

The concept of the Gates The sculpted figure also has can partly be understood by an impact because of its considering The Gates of depiction of muscularity, its Paradise by Ghiberti, verisimilitude and 1425-52, in Florence. its scale, slightly larger than life. It is given an added The figure of the The impact when seen in the Thinker combines a number context of the tympanum of considerations made by looking down and meditating Rodin. The most immediate on the souls in Dante’s Hell. of these would be Michelangelo’s Tomb of The subject taken beyond a Lorenzo de Medici, Duke of named human takes on a Urbino, with Dawn and gravitas metonymically for all Evening, 1520-34, in the humankind. Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence. A more recent Rodin used a drawing of The exemplar for Rodin could Thinker as one of his have been the father figure illustrations for Charles in Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Baudelaire’s Fleurs de Mal (The sculpture of Ugolino and his Flowers of Evil) (XX), printed Sons, 1861, depicting part of in 1918. a story from The Inferno in Dante’s Comedy. The There are more than 20 bona Carpeaux also pays homage fide copies of the sculpture. to Laocoön and his Sons, in the One most notably in the Vatican collection, a Musée Rodin in Paris and Hellenistic Greek sculpture another in the Cantor Arts Michelangelo saw excavated Center at Stanford from the ground in Rome in University. 1515. allenfi[email protected] 1 Rodin, The Thinker, initial analysis

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