Rodin's thinker

You can't earn your support,
That on the subcrejs and on light feathers
Until today, no one has found glory!
Dante Alighieri

By: Bledar Kurti

statuary The thinker it is one of the iconic images of world sculpture, but also a visual symbol of philosophy, poetry, and even of man himself. We often see this figure of the thoughtful man on book covers, postcards and illustrations, but the story of the creation of this work originates from hell. What hell other than the one described in the work The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri.

In 1880, the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was commissioned to create the gate of the Museum of Decorative Arts building. The building was never built, but Rodin created a gate that would go down in history: Gates of Hell, based on Dante's Inferno, on which he worked for the next 37 years. This gate occupies a unique place in Rodin's oeuvre. Working diligently on this project for several decades, he created around 200 figures that formed an incredible ground for the ideas he would have for the rest of his life. In this doorway, the figures pour down with an incredible sense of movement, with bodies displaying passion, eroticism and despair. But most importantly, elements of the figures The Gates of Hell, they worked on their own, thus creating special works which today are among the masterpieces of the world, such as The Thinker, The Kiss, The Three Shadows, and others.

There are several gate castings found around the world, but a worthy reference is that of Rodin Museum in Paris. The bronze gate weighs 8 tons and measures six meters high and four meters wide. Its gates do not open. Rodin was inspired by Gates of Heaven in the Baptistery of St. John in Florence, created by the hand of Lorenzo Ghiberti in the 15th century, but he chose not to deal with heaven but with hell, as it was not only more dramatic, but, inspired by the figures of lost souls in the mural The Last Judgment from Michelangelo, his idol, Rodin decided to illustrate hell in sculpture for the first time.

"I had a great admiration for Dante," said Rodin, "He is not only a visionary, but also a sculptor. His expression is a tombstone. I lived a whole year with Dante … drawing all the circles of his hell.” And for one year, Rodin, with Dante's book in his pocket, sketched over 300 figures, each with a unique habit or feeling, creating countless sketches, combining and recomposing them time and time again, until he also used the art of photography. , after he started photographing the figures, he then put them together as a collage to achieve the composition he wanted.

The Gates of Hell there are three levels: the earthly level, the eye level, and the supernatural level. On top of the gate are found The Three Shadows, united in one hand, as a single unit, similar to each other, which in their circle symbolize the circle of hell that is described by Dante in the III canto of The Divine Comedy:

From here it is passed to the city of misery,
From here it is passed into endless pain,
This is where the spirits lose their sight.

The Three Shadows they are also symbolic of the trinity, but not of the divine but of hell, which seem to be the warnings for anyone who enters that gate. Below them, at the level of the supernatural, also known as the level of thought, is found The thinker. This figure is the main and the center of the whole relief. Who is this man? Who is this thinker?

Rodin began to portray Dante himself through this figure: his father The Divine Comedy, the pen that made the historical description of hell. But neither Dante nor the merciful Virgil, who accompanied Dante on his journey to hell, could fulfill the scene composed by Rodin, so the master sculptor looked for an earlier origin of hell, a connecting point between man and seen and the modern viewer, between Dante and Rodin himself, the figure that would symbolize the fall of all humanity, the universal man in his lost and infernal state. This was Adam. The first man and the father of the last man. He unfolds haunted at the top of the gate, saddened by the condemned state of humanity, which because of him was deprived of divine glory and now has as its destination hell, as the reality without return. Rodin created Adam's haunting and sadness also according to Dante's description:

My Creator was moved by his justice;
Divine power itself has fashioned me,
The highest knowledge, the first love.
Nothing else was created before me
Veçthan eternal, and I stand beyond.
O you who enter, you are finished!

Adam, The thinker the universal sits, lost in thought, with his face resting on his wrist, like a broken branch, all naked, like Michelangelo's Adam, but unlike him who radiates beauty from the divine touch, Rodin's Adam is ruined in his lost state, and for the souls who enter that gate of hell from which there is no return.

At ground level, i.e. the lower level of the gate, you can see graves opening and lost souls falling from above and coming out of the lower dungeon. A real hellish chaos. Similar to the lost souls of The Last Judgment in Michelangelo's fresco. But in all this chaos there is also a premeditated organization and order. Many figures are blurred and left unfinished but some parts of them are created in detail and skillfully illustrated. This technique, semi-detailed figures, Rodin imitated from Michelangelo. He gave some parts of the sculptures a delicate and detailed finish, leaving the rest deliberately unfinished. This style can be seen in most of Rodin's works.

At eye level, at The Gates of Hell some historical and illustrative figures from Dante's work are also distinguished. Rodin had originally created other figures which he decided to remove and treat as separate works. For example, his famous work kissing, was originally composed for The Gates of Hell, but it was too sensual and romantic for that scene, so Rodin made it into a separate sculpture, along with enlargements of The thinker and The Three Shadows which are already separate works from the gate relief. But the characters of the work kissing, are found in other forms at the gate. They are Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, the couple in love, who, both married to others, committed adultery. Their story lasted for more than ten years, and finally, one night, Francesca's husband caught and killed them both. This historical couple is also described in Dante's work where they are in the second circle of hell, reserved for sinners of lust, as guilty of their betrayal.

In his work, Dante expresses pity for those lovers, and he writes: "Francesca, these groans are making me weep sad with pity." Even Rodin felt sorry for their history, so he immortalized them in sculpture in a special composition.

Another scene that is noticed at eye level The Gates of Hell it is the story of Ugolino and his children. Count Ugolino was a nobleman, politician, and commander who was convicted of treason against his city, Pisa. He was handcuffed in a cell with his children and left to starve. After the children died first, he fed on their corpses. Dante describes Ugolino in the ninth circle, the deepest part of hell, reserved for traitors:

Therefore I blinded them,
touch my babies with me;
I called them two days after they finished,
Then stronger than the pain of hunger!

Rodin illustrated the story of Ugolino in sculpture with extraordinary skill. His wasted body, mouth half open, eyes bulging with hunger, and hands trying to lift up one of the dead boys, his food for the next day, are sculptural justice to the most chilling verse in the work of Dante Alighieri, Then stronger than pain than hunger, which takes on even more tragic meaning from Rodin's sculpture.

acts The Gates of Hell went through many vicissitudes, due to the failure and construction of the Decorative Museum. Rodin exhibited only one version of it, almost stripped of all figures, and it obviously received a lot of criticism. But meanwhile, The Thinker, The Three Shades, The Kiss, Ugolino and his children were enlarged cast in several copies sold successfully. Because of his semi-finished style and treatment of the figure as emotional mass rather than minute detail, Rodin invited much criticism, similar to what the Impressionists experienced in painting who were criticized for their unfinished paintings.

Rodin encountered a world where his particular art was also under the tutelage of leaders who he felt were unworthy of their position. He often said that: "They hold the keys of heaven and will not allow any good soul to enter it, but they themselves can never enter" And the biggest controversy that he encountered was also over the sculpture of the writer distinguished French Honoré de Balzac, which Rodin created in such a distinctive style that it divided the opinion of artists of the time, art critics, officials and the general public.

During the visit to Rodin Museum, after leaving behind the statue The thinker and the relief The Gates of Hell, when Balzac's monument appeared before my eyes, I immediately understood why that figure had provoked so much criticism. Such a severe treatment of forms and a sculptural style seemed highly innovative for 1898. Rodin's Balzac bears no resemblance to Balzac as a man, but in him the personality of the great writer is magnificently captured and unfolded.

From the beginning, Rodin wanted to do something out of the ordinary. He read and re-read all of Balzac's novels, spent a month in the writer's birthplace to familiarize himself with the nature of the local people, and even met Balzac's tailor to learn the exact shape and proportions of his body, despite that he had been dead forty years. Rodin was not so much given to reveal what Balzac looked like, but his personality and name. “I have in mind his incomparable work,” wrote Rodin, “the hardships of his life, his indefatigable struggles, and his great courage. I want to express all this."

And so he did. He revealed Balzac with a strong, warrior-like nature, first naked and then covered by a hanging monk's robe. A true essence of the writer without ordinary details of similarity. Société des Gens des Lettres, who commissioned the work, demanded that Rodin return the part of the payment they had given her as they were shocked by Balzac's nudity, and were even shocked again when he covered it up, as even under his clothes it was clear that Balzac was holding his penis in his hands his raised, as an attribute of Rodin for the vitality of the writer as a man, artist, and creator.

Other artists were more supportive of the work. Oscar Wilde, the sharp-tongued Irish writer, called the statue "magnificent", and Claude Monet used the same word, writing to his friend Rodin that: "it is absolutely beautiful and magnificent, and I cannot take it away from me." mind."

The secret of Rodin's works was that he saw sculpture as a whole as an unfolding of the inner world, so they are also so appealing, touching and exciting. According to the memoirs of Rodin's secretary, the master considered sculpture a necessity and inner vision of the artist. "Only the emotional vision of the artist can feel with sufficient intensity the pulsating depths of what unfolds on the surface," said the master.

Rodin was one of the most prominent figures of Romanticism, and it took some time to understand his true influence on the art and worldview of the twentieth century. He is considered one of the greatest artists of his time as the most innovative and influential sculptor in sculpture since Michelangelo. His genius lay in the ability he showed to free sculpture from the idealized academic conventions that characterized the works of subsequent artists. Rodin's main subject and source of inspiration was the human body, from simple studies to penetrating portraits depicting human passion and suffering, constantly shocking the public with his sensual themes, frequent fragmentation and abstraction of the human form. With a powerful highly subjective and impressionistic modeling technique, he captured movement and expressed emotion by altering traditional positions and gestures to create dynamic, highly personal figures that glorify the vitality of the human spirit.

He knew how to show mastery in realism, as when sculpture The Bronze Age when it was first exhibited it looked so lifelike that critics and viewers thought that Rodin had cast the form of a real man instead of modeling the figure himself, but he chose to express the feelings and depths of human nature through sculpture. He saw natural objects in a new way and only in this way could he produce living sculptures.

Although Rodin suffered from myopia, and did not manage to get a good education as he could not even look at the blackboard, and even got too close to the models to see what they looked like, he managed to create through the eyes of art works that continue even today. today the viewers are amazed, and created a sculptural tableau as The Gates of Hell which reveals to us the poetic, thoughtful, but also hellish face of art.

"When I saw clay for the first time," he said, "I felt like I was ascending to heaven." While we when we see the statue The thinker let's think with him about the reality of the situation in which all humanity is.

The thinker we are ourselves. / "ExLibris" newspaper/