The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Auguste Rodin · Les Bourgeois de Calais · a group of six standing figures in bronze, in the round, a little over life size, on one low common base · commissioned by the municipality of Calais in 1884 · composed and modelled 1884 to 1889, the full plaster shown in Paris in 1889 · scored as the group in its first bronze cast, founded for the city of Calais and unveiled there in 1895; the maquettes, the studies, the single figures and the later authorised casts are context, the casts counting for survival and presence only
Mode
The public monument brought down from its pedestal: a commemorative group with no hero above the rest, no allegory and no principal face, modelled with enlarged hands and feet and broken planes
Mythos
The few offered for the many: the scapegoat who walks out of the city, the procession to death, the penitent in shirt and halter, the keys surrendered
Phase
Commissioned 1884; the full plaster complete and shown in Paris in 1889; the first bronze unveiled in Calais in 1895
Presentation
Bronze in the round, six figures a little over life size on one low common base, built for a circuit; outdoors in the city that commissioned it
Register
Gravity without consolation: resignation, defiance, grief and despair held at one pitch of dread
Scale
Six men, one base, one act
Governing Proposition
Six men in sackcloth shirts, barefoot, with ropes at their necks, stand on one low base with no apex and no front: an old man walking first with his eyes down, a man rigid with the key held across his body, a man doubled over his head in his hands, two turning back toward the town, one raising an open hand. They are near one another and none touches, consoles or looks at another. The wager of the work is that a public monument can give a city the cost of its heroism rather than its glory, and that a common sacrifice, borne singly by six, can be known only by walking among them one by one.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1347, in Jean Froissart’s account, six burghers of Calais offered themselves to Edward III to end the English siege of their town. They walked out bareheaded and barefoot, in their shirts, with halters round their necks, carrying the keys of the town. In 1884 the municipality of Calais commissioned Auguste Rodin to honour Eustache de Saint-Pierre and the burghers who went with him.
Rodin took the chronicle at its word and took its number seriously. He made six men, not a hero and his following, and he kept the particulars: the shirts of sackcloth, the bare feet, the ropes, the key. The six are known, by tradition and by Rodin’s own titles for the separate figures, as Eustache de Saint-Pierre, Jean d’Aire, who holds the key, Jacques de Wissant, Pierre de Wissant, Jean de Fiennes and Andrieu d’Andres. They stand on one low common base, a little over life size, and no figure is set frontal to the others.
The composition was modelled from 1884 to 1889, and the full plaster was shown in Paris in 1889 at the Galerie Georges Petit, in the joint exhibition with Monet. The work scored here is the group as Rodin composed it, in its first bronze cast, founded for Calais and unveiled there in 1895. The maquettes, the full-size studies, the single figures enlarged and reduced in his life and after, and the later authorised casts are context; the casts carry the same form and count for survival only.
Movement II
Each man is a different state under one sentence. Eustache, old and stooped, eyes down, walking first, is the decision already made. Jean d’Aire stands rigid with the key held across his body, his jaw set: the decision held by will. Andrieu d’Andres is doubled over his own head, his hands on it: the decision unbearable. Two turn back toward the town, and Pierre de Wissant raises an open hand against nothing: the doubt and the farewell. The work’s meaning is that sentence distributed among six bodies, and none of the six can be removed without losing a part of it.
The states are carried by the hands. There are twelve of them, at or above life size, and at least four of the six figures spend their weight in them: raised to the head, held open or clenched, or closed on the key. Rodin enlarged the hands and the feet beyond true proportion so that the weight of the body and of the will falls into them, and the distortion persuades rather than shows. The feet drag; the arms are stretched; the faces are turned away. Courage is disclosed as it is actually lived, by men walking toward death while afraid, each in his own way, and going anyway.
Each figure was modelled first nude, at full size, and then clothed in the heavy shirt, so that the drapery declares the body under it. The surfaces are broken into planes that take and shed light, and the bronze reads differently by the hour. The roughness of the modelling, the enlarged extremities and the sackcloth hold across all six, and nothing breaks register into allegory, ornament or portrait. The range runs from resignation through defiance and grief to despair, and it is all of one kind: fear and will before death.
Movement III
The commemorative monument of the nineteenth century set one hero, or a hero at the apex of a pyramid of lesser figures and allegories, on a pedestal above the street, to be read from the front. Put that form in place of this one, Eustache at the apex and the others grouped below him in rising lines, and the work would know the opposite of what it knows: a hero and his followers, sacrifice made glorious, the town looking up. Rodin gave the city no apex, no hero above the rest, no allegory and no front. The figures stand on one low base, as if the pedestal had sunk.
The dispersed ring is the instrument of the content. It has no centre, and no single view, and no single photograph, contains the work. The viewer walks among the condemned and meets them one by one, and the relations among the six change at every step. The six are near one another and none touches, consoles or looks at another, and the gaps between them, which no one closes, are the work’s statement that a common sacrifice is borne singly. The group is a crowd of solitudes.
The balance of six standing figures on one shallow base, with weight and gaze pulling in six directions, is a feat of composition in the round. It is not everywhere resolved. Where figures stand close they relate less surely in space than in feeling, and from some angles the joins of the group read as adjacency rather than structure; the single figures were worked more than the whole. Each figure stands alone and was enlarged and cast singly, so the arrangement is one the figures allow rather than one they compel.
Movement IV
A form that depends on the low base and the open circuit depends on where it is set. The Rodin literature gives a history of this cast’s first setting: that the city raised the group on a tall pedestal behind railings against Rodin’s wishes, and that it was moved and lowered in 1924. That history is widely reported; it is given here as reported and has not been verified. As reported, it would have undone half of the form for some three decades, and it is weighed only on the work’s survival, not on its making.
Seen as it was made, on a low base, the figures stand at the viewer’s height, just over life, and the dread is that of being among them. The elevation is grave, not radiant, and it comes again and again as one walks round: the old man’s head, the long hollow of the man bent into his hands, the open hand lifted, the set jaw. Each view gives a new figure the weight of the whole. There is no single summit image and no moment of terror or transport that strikes at once; the elevation is cumulative and austere, and distance weakens it.
The archetype is built from the same particulars: the few offered for the many, the scapegoat who walks out of the city, the procession to death. The rope and the shirt carry echoes of the Passion and of penitential processions without having them imposed, and the particular stays particular, named men, a town, a king, a year. The orders the work holds are integrated in one act: the body, consciousness, the city, the state and war, history, the sacred and death. What it leaves out is what the six leave behind: the town, the families, the labour, the king offstage, and nature, which has no place.
Movement V
The form is whole. The group stands in bronze, intact, with the full plaster and the studies kept in the Musée Rodin and the same form held in authorised casts in Europe, the United States and Asia, so that no single loss can take the work. Its presence has been continuous since 1889; the composition was complete 137 years ago and the first cast is 131 years old. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment, no costume of the 1880s and no allegory, only men in shirts, and so it has outlived the commemorative tradition it rejected. The casts made after Rodin’s death, though authorised, are editions he did not see.
Each cast set in a different place, beside Parliament in London, in Calais, in museum gardens and courts, has made the group say a different thing about power and its subjects. It stands at the start of the line by which the public monument came down to the viewer’s ground, and its anti-heroic, collective and grieving manner is a precedent behind much modern memorial sculpture. That reach is partly shared with the rest of Rodin’s work, the Gates, the Balzac, the partial figure, and the line from this group to particular later memorials is more often asserted than documented. The question it asks is one, and return deepens one answer.
The desk sets it a tenth above The Gates of Hell at 8.6, a finished, delivered and unified work over an unfinished portal, though the portal keeps the higher sublime, the finer modelling and the wider reach, as the source of the language both share; well above The Thinker at 8.3; level with Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans at 8.7, the other public subjects turned from heroism to suffering; above Giacometti’s Walking Man I at 8.5; and a tenth under Euripides’ The Trojan Women and Britten’s War Requiem at 8.8, a conquered city before its sentence and a civic memorial that refuses glory. Six men walk out of their town in their shirts, and the city that asked for their glory was given their cost.
Act III · The Twelve
The number is given by the story, and the work takes the number seriously: six men, not a hero and his following. Put each to the subtractive test. Eustache de Saint-Pierre, old, stooped, eyes down, walking first, cannot go: he is the decision already made. Jean d’Aire, rigid, the key across his body, cannot go: he is the decision held by will. The man with his head in his hands cannot go: he is the decision unbearable. The two who turn back and the one who raises an open hand are the doubt and the farewell. What gives is the arrangement. Each figure stands alone and was enlarged and cast singly, so the composition scored is one of several the figures would allow. The figures are required; their exact placing less so.
Score: 8.6 / 10
What is disclosed is courage as it is actually lived: not the lifting of a sword or the calm of the martyr, but men walking toward death while afraid, each in his own way, and going anyway. The chronicle’s heroism is given its cost. It discloses too that a common sacrifice is borne singly: the six are together and none touches, consoles or looks at another, a crowd of solitudes. These are stateable conditions, true outside 1347, disclosed through the body, the dragging feet, the stretched arms, the faces averted, as fully as a text could say them. Held below the top: the disclosure is single, a deepening of one truth about will and fear, not the reorganisation of a whole order of seeing that Las Meninas, at 9.1 here, makes.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Elevation here is grave, not radiant, and it comes again and again as one walks round. The old man’s head, Andrieu d’Andres bent into his hands, the open hand of Pierre de Wissant lifted against nothing, Jean d’Aire’s set jaw: each view gives a new figure the weight of the whole. Just over life size and on a low base, the figures stand at the viewer’s height, and the dread is that of being among them. The sublime is the condemned man’s dignity without consolation, and it holds in daylight on a square as in a museum hall. Against it: there is no single summit image, no moment of terror or transport that strikes at once. The elevation is cumulative and austere, and it is weakened wherever the group is raised and seen from far off.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The archetype is built, not evoked: the few offered for the many, the scapegoat who walks out of the city, the procession to death. The halters, the sackcloth shirts, the bare feet and the key surrendered are the chronicle’s particulars and the instruments of a rite, so that the figures read at once as six men of a besieged town and as the type of the penitent and the sacrificed. Echoes of the Passion and of penitential processions are present in the rope and the shirt, carried by the story’s own furniture rather than imposed. The particular stays particular: named men, a town, a king, a year. Held below 9 because the pattern is one and is not developed in layers, and the mythic order is never brought into argument with another, as The Large Bathers sets myth against myth.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance is the nineteenth-century commemorative monument: one hero, or a hero at the apex of a pyramid of lesser figures and allegories, raised on a pedestal above the street and read from the front. The turn is total. No apex, no hero above the rest, no allegory, no frontal view; the figures on one low base as if the pedestal had sunk; bodies with enlarged hands and feet, rough planes, and the strain of fear shown at the scale of civic statuary. The Rodin literature reports a cost paid for it, in objections from the commission, delay and a first setting that raised the group again; that history is reported, not verified here. Against a 9: Rodin was established, the Gates had given him his manner, and the turn is within figuration. Below Fountain and The Large Bathers at 9.4.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Substitute the pyramid of the commemorative monument, Eustache at its apex and the others grouped below him in rising lines, and the work would know the opposite of what it knows: a hero and his followers, sacrifice made glorious, the town looking up. Substitute a relief or a painting and the circuit goes, and with it the knowledge that each man is alone and that no view gives the whole. The dispersed ring on a low base, with no centre and no front, is the instrument of the content: it makes the viewer walk among the condemned and meet them one by one, and the gaps between them, which no one closes, state their solitude. The modelling of each body as a state of mind is form as knowledge. Held under 9 because the arrangement was not fixed by the figures themselves, and a setting can undo half of it.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The evidence: more than a century of return by sculptors, historians and the public, a central place in every account of Rodin and of the public monument after him, and a literature on the commission, the figures and the casts that has not exhausted it. Each cast in a different site, beside Parliament in London, in Calais, in museum gardens and courts, has made the group say a different thing about power and its subjects. Formally the circuit yields on return: no single photograph contains the work, and the relations among six figures change at every step. Against a higher mark: the question it asks is singular, and return deepens one answer rather than opening many; its literature is richer in history and making than in competing readings of what the work means.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Shown in 1889, so force and reach are scored together, in the field of European public and figurative sculpture of the 1880s and after. Intrinsic force: the decisive reorganisation of the public monument, from the pedestal and the hero toward the ground and the many, from celebration to the bearing of cost. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the group stands at the start of the line by which the monument came down to the viewer’s ground, and its anti-heroic, collective and grieving manner is a precedent behind much modern memorial sculpture, through the mourning figures of Lehmbruck and Kollwitz to memorials set at ground level later in the twentieth century. The discount: much of that reach belongs to Rodin’s work as a whole, the Gates, the Balzac, the partial figure, and the line to particular memorials is more often asserted than documented.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: bronze, intact, the full plaster and the studies kept in the Musée Rodin, and the same form held in authorised casts in Europe, the United States and Asia, so that no single loss can take the work. Presence has been continuous since 1889 and, through the casts, is as wide as for any modern sculpture; fame is presence and earns a tenth at most. The surface is not fixed to its moment: no costume of the 1880s, no allegory of its republic, only men in shirts, which is why it has outlived the commemorative tradition it rejected. The charge: the first cast is reported to have stood for decades in a setting that undid part of its form, and the casts made after Rodin’s death, though authorised, are editions he did not see.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium at the highest level, and load-bearing. Each figure was modelled first nude, at full size, and then clothed in the heavy shirt, so that the drapery declares the body under it. The surfaces are broken into planes that take and shed light, so the bronze reads differently by the hour. The hands and feet are enlarged beyond true proportion so that the weight of body and will falls into them, and the distortion persuades rather than shows. The balance of six standing figures on one shallow base, weight and gaze pulling six ways, is a feat of composition in the round, and the casting is true to the modelled surface. Held at 9.0: the joins of the group, where figures stand close without relating in space as surely as in feeling, are less resolved from some angles, and the single figures were worked more than the whole.
Score: 9.0 / 10
One law governs: each man is the same sentence received differently, and every element obeys it. Take the two most distant figures, Eustache walking forward resigned and Andrieu d’Andres doubled over his own head: they are two answers to one question, made of one surface and one scale. The roughness of the modelling, the enlarged extremities and the sackcloth hold across all six, and nothing breaks register into allegory, ornament or portrait. The range is real, from resignation through defiance and grief to despair, so the coherence is not narrowness. Against a higher figure: the range is of one kind, fear and will before death, and the law is easier to keep across six states of one man than across the distances Las Meninas or The Large Bathers hold.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held: the body, made in six figures the instrument of feeling; consciousness, each man’s interior turned outward; the city and its citizens, since the act is civic; the state and war, in the king, the siege and the surrender of keys; history, the fourteenth century as remembered in the nineteenth; the sacred, in the penitential dress and the rite of offering; and death. They are integrated, since one act touches all. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent or only implied: the town, the families and the labour the six leave behind are not shown, the king is offstage, nature has no place, and the whole is held in a single moment of six men. A group holds more than a single figure, as The Thinker at 6.6 shows, and less than a painted world.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Made at 9.0, then The Swerve and The Living Form at 8.9. A form whole in bronze, held in authorised casts on several continents, its surface fixed to no moment; modelling of the highest command, each figure made nude and then clothed, the hands and feet enlarged to carry the will; a decisive turn of the public monument from pedestal and hero to the ground and the many; and a dispersed ring on a low base, with no centre and no front, that is the instrument of what the work knows.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: seven orders held in one act, and the town, the families, the labour, the king and nature left outside it. Above it, The Inevitable, The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 8.6: an arrangement the figures allow rather than compel, an elevation cumulative and austere with no single summit, and one question deepened rather than many opened. The four are one fact: six men in one moment, each a different answer to one sentence.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.9, The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below 8.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met. The twelve sum to 104.3, an average of 8.69 that displays 8.7, in Tier IV; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone, three tenths short of 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the group, its composition, modelling and casts, and of its commission and its literature; known well as a composition and as an object seen in the round in photographs and casts, and its commission’s history known in outline and its documents only by report. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the group of six figures as Rodin composed and modelled it, 1884 to 1889, in its first bronze cast, founded for the city of Calais and unveiled there in 1895. The two maquettes of 1884 and 1885, the full-size studies of the figures nude and of heads and hands, the enlargements and reductions of single figures made in Rodin’s life and after, and the later authorised casts, among them the London group and the cast of the Musée Rodin, are context; the casts carry the same form and count for survival and presence only. The work carries no words, and nothing is quoted. The history of the first setting, the tall pedestal and railings of 1895 and the move and lowering of 1924, is given only as reported, and it is weighed on The Imperishable alone; the commission’s objections and the delay are named only as reported, without their particulars. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the day of the unveiling, the group’s dimensions, the founder and the process of the first cast, the number of authorised casts, the dates of the London cast, what the commission asked for in place of the second maquette, the cause of the delay of payment and casting, and the base Rodin proposed for the group.