“No art will ever surpass Pheidias”. Well, that appears to have been the view of Auguste Rodin …. which was a bit odd really when you realise that he had never been to Greece, a great deal of what he knew about Greek sculpture was gleaned from books, and pieces collected in western Europe by various antiquarians. He himself, I understand, accumulated a whole museum of classical fragments. His inpiration, one might say, was an ideal shaped as much in his own imagination as in experience. Rodin may well have been a bit dogmatic in his opinions about sculpture, but the things he himself produced were indeed astonishing.
I rounded off my trip to London today with a morning spent in the British Museum, where the exhibition in the Sainsbury being is devoted to Rodin’s relationship to Greece and Greek sculpture. It really is a remarkable experience and I learned an enormous amount there. It seems that early in his career he was invited to submit designs for a huge set of bronze doors, as a part of a large architectural project. He produced a visionary scheme based upon Dante’s Inferno, that he entitled The Gates of Hell. Sadly the scheme fell through, and he was left with an immense portfolio of ideas that he preceded to draw upon as the sources of a succession of subsequent projects unrelated to their original inspiration. His famous The Thinker, for example, was originally intended to gaze intently into the depths of Hell, either as Minos (who was responsible for awarding punishments in the nether-world) or perhaps even as Dante himself. A vary large proportion of this subsequent oeuvre can be identified as drawn from the original maquette for this project. I guess that it just goes to show that as artists we just have to respond to the opportunities that come along.
I did end the morning convinced that Rodin’s most impressive work was his Burghers of Calais. This, I am sure, has an emotional force unmatched in any of his other pieces.
Not long ago I posted a reflection in which I remarked upon the way in which the Italian painter Renato Guttuso spoke of his own work as his mestiere–his job or his trade. In many respects I was reminded of this looking at the Rodin exhibition, as it included photographs and film of him at work. The sheer physicality of what is involved in being a sculptor came over very sharply, and in remarkable contrast to the somewhat elevated way in which he spoke or wrote about art.