surroundings had to be found within it. It was the sculptor Leonardo who gave this look of unapproachability to the Mona Lisa, this motion inward, this gaze one cannot meet. His Francesco Sforza probably had the same quality, this expression of motion in return, like a proud ambassador who returns to his country after the fulfillment of some great purpose.
In the long years that passed between the mask of The Man with the Broken Nose and the figure of First Man, Rodin developed in many quiet ways. New associations linked him more closely with the tradition of his art. This past and its greatness, which so many before him had felt to be a burden, lent wings to Rodin, carrying him aloft. For when he sensed confirmation in those years, affirmation of what he wanted and was searching for, it came from the art of antiquity and from the furrowed darkness of cathedrals. Living human beings didn’t speak to him in those years. Stones spoke.
If the Man with the Broken Nose had demonstrated Rodin’s profound understanding of the human face, the First Man manifested his complete mastery of the body. “Souverain tailleur d’ymaiges” (Soverign tailor of images) – that title used selflessly by the masters of the Middle Ages to appraise one another’s work – now came to him. Life was not simply great all over this life-size nude figure, it was endowed everywhere with the same sublimity of expression. What appeared on the face – the pain of a difficult awakening along with the longing for this hardship – was written as well on the smallest feature of its body. Every part was a mouth giving voice to it in some way. The most exacting eye could not discover any part of this figure that could be identified as less alive, less determined and clear. It was as if strength surged up from the depths of the earth to fill the veins of this man. He was like the silhouette of a tree facing spring storms, fearful because the fruit and fullness of its summer no longer lives in the roots, but rather is rising slowly, up through the trunk buffeted by great winds.
The Man with the Broken Nose, 1864.
Bronze, 26 × 18 × 23 cm.
Musée Rodin, Paris.
The Thinker, 1879–1880.
Plaster.
Musée Rodin, Paris.
The Thinker, 1881.
Bronze, 71.5 × 40 × 58 cm.
Musée Rodin, Paris.
The Age of Bronze, 1875–1876.
Bronze, 175.3 × 67.5 × 52.9 cm.
Musée Rodin, Paris.
The Age of Bronze is significant in another sense as well. It marks the birth of gesture in the work of Rodin. This gesture, which would grow and develop with such force and proportion, came forth here like the waters of a spring, running down softly over the body. It awoke in the darkness of earliest times, and seems, as it grows, to run through the breadth of this work as it does through the ages, and to pass far beyond to those who will come. It appears tentatively in the raised arms, arms so heavy that one of the hands comes to rest on the crown of the head. But this hand is not asleep; it is gathering strength. High up on the solitary peak of the brain, it prepares itself for work – for the work of centuries, which has no limit or end. And in the right foot the first step waits. We might describe this gesture as one of the repose enclosed in a hard bud.
Embers of thoughts and a storm of the will: it opens and John comes out, with those eloquent, agitated arms, and the great bearing of one who feels another coming up from behind. The body of this man is no longer untested: the deserts have scorched him, hunger has racked him, and thirst has sapped his strength. He has come through it all and is hardened. His lean, ascetic body is like a wooden handle, holding the wide fork of his stride. He walks. He walks as if the whole wide world were in him, as if he were apportioning it as he walks. He walks. His arms speak of this walking, and his fingers stretch out, a sign of his stride in the air. This is the first walker in Rodin’s work, but many more would follow.
There are The Burghers of Calais (pp. 17, 25, 28, 29) setting out on their arduous journey, and all his walkers seem to prepare the way for the great challenging stride of Balzac. But the gestures of standing are developed further as well. The figures withdraw within themselves, curling up like burning paper, growing stronger, more concentrated and vital. Exemplary of this is the figure of Eve, which was originally intended to stand above The Gates of Hell (pp. 9, 14). Her head is sunk deep in the darkness of her arms, which are folded across her chest as if she were freezing. The back is rounded, the neck almost horizontal, and she leans forward as if to listen to her own body, in which a strange future is beginning to stir. It is almost as if the weight of the future burdens this woman’s senses, drawing her down from the abstractness of life and into the deep humble service of motherhood.
Rodin returns again and again in his nude figures to this turn inward, to this intense listening to one’s own depths. We see it in the extraordinary figure he called Meditation (bronze), and in the unforgettable the Inner Voice (plaster), the softest voice of Victor Hugo’s songs, which is almost concealed by the voice of anger in the monument to the poet. Never before had the human body been so concentrated around its interior, so shaped by its own soul and yet restrained by the elastic power of its blood. And the way the neck rises ever so slightly, stretching to hold the listening head above the distant rush of life, is so impressive and deeply felt that one has a difficult time remembering a gesture as moving or expressive. The arms are noticeably missing. In this case Rodin must have felt them to be too easy a solution to his problem, something not belonging to a body that wished to remain shrouded in itself, without any help from outside.
The Three Shades, 1880.
Bronze, 96.6 × 92 × 54.1 cm.
Musée Rodin, Paris.
Jules-Bastien Lepage, 1887.
Plaster, 176 × 87.5 × 88 cm.
Musée Rodin, Paris.
Bust of the Sculptor Jules Dalou, 1883.
Bronze, 52.2 × 42.9 × 26.7 cm.
Musée Rodin, Paris.
Georges Clemenceau, 1911.
Bronze, 50 × 32 × 25 cm.
Musée Rodin, Paris.
One thinks of how Duse, left painfully alone in one of D’Annunzio’s plays, tried to embrace without arms and to hold without hands. This scene, in which her body learned a caress that extended far beyond itself, belongs to the unforgettable moments of her acting career. It conveyed the sense that arms are superfluous, merely decorative effects common among the rich and excessive, which one could cast off in order to be completely poor. At that moment one did not have the sense that she had forfeited something important; rather, she was like someone who has given her cup away in order to drink from the stream, like someone who is naked and still a bit awkward with the depth of the revelation.
Saint John the Baptist, 1880.
Bronze.
Musée
