The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Auguste Rodin · La Porte de l’Enfer · a monumental portal in high and low relief with figures in the round · two leaves under a lintel and a tympanum, between two pilasters, under a cornice · some six metres high · the full-size plaster as Rodin left it, Musée d’Orsay, Paris · worked 1880 to 1917, never delivered · cast in bronze by the Alexis Rudier foundry, 1926 to 1928, for the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia, and the Musée Rodin, Paris, with later casts
Mode
Monumental portal as a field of bodies; relief, figure in the round and architecture in one object, and the working ground of a sculptor’s whole practice
Mythos
The threshold of hell made a door that does not open; the poet in the Judge’s seat; the father who devours, the lovers who fall, one body three times over
Phase
Commissioned 1880, worked until Rodin’s death in 1917 and never delivered; shown almost empty in 1900; first cast in bronze 1926 to 1928
Presentation
Plaster, cast after the maker’s death in bronze; two undivided leaves under a lintel and tympanum, between pilasters, under a cornice; low relief rising through high relief to figures in the round
Register
Dread throughout, from the crawling and falling of the leaves to the stillness of the seated figure above them
Scale
Some six metres of bodies, one mind above them, thirty-seven years
Governing Proposition
A door commissioned for a museum that was never built becomes, over thirty-seven years, a door that does not open: two leaves without panels or ground, where bodies rise out of the material and fall back into it, under a tympanum where a Christian portal sets its Judge and where a poet sits instead, looking down. The wager of the work is that hell needs no judge: that desire is its own damnation, and that the mind which imagined it can only watch.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1880 the French state commissioned a door from Auguste Rodin. It was to be the entrance of a planned Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and the subject proposed was Dante’s Inferno. The museum was never built. The door was never delivered, and it was never cast in bronze while Rodin lived. He worked on it from 1880 until his death at Meudon on 17 November 1917, thirty-seven years, and the full-size plaster he left stands now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
The plan is a portal’s. Two door leaves stand under a lintel and a tympanum, framed by two pilasters and crowned by a cornice, some six metres high in all. At the centre of the tympanum sits The Thinker, leaning forward over the leaves. On the cornice stand The Three Shades. The left leaf carries Ugolino and his children. The leaves are not divided into panels, and they do not open. The door is a door in form only: it can be stood before and never passed through.
Its bodies pass from low relief through high relief into the round. Heads and bodies a few centimetres high rise out of the leaves and sink back into them, the pilasters and the lintel are overrun, and at the top The Thinker and the Shades stand free. Over thirty-seven years figures came out of the door to lead lives of their own and went back into it, and the door itself never reached a final state. The work is that moving form as Rodin left it in plaster, with the bronzes cast from it after his death as part of the one work.
Movement II
A Christian portal has a fixed theology, and its tympanum is the seat of the Judge. The Gates keep the architecture and empty it. There is no Christ in the tympanum, no Minos at the entrance, no circle and no order of sins. Where the Judge should sit, a naked man sits with his chin on his hand, leaning forward over the leaves, looking down. The seat of judgement is kept, and given to someone else.
He was conceived as the poet: Dante, seated over the hell he imagined. Enlarged and set apart, he became one of the most reproduced images in the world, but in the tympanum he is a figure in a structure. He is the poet, then the maker, then any mind at all, seated over the damned as their author and their witness. His stillness is absolute, and below it everything falls. The falling is what he sees, and the stillness is the strain of seeing it: a mind that contemplates what it has imagined and cannot stop it.
Above him, on the cornice, stand The Three Shades: three casts of one figure turned about a common point, heads bowed so far that the necks become a horizontal line, hands meeting at one point. They stand over a door that bears no words. The line written over the gate of Dante’s hell, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (Inferno III, 9), which bids those who enter abandon all hope, is not on the Gates. The Shades bow toward the place where it would stand, three times the same body, and the warning is present by its absence, as the Judge is.
Movement III
The inheritance was the bronze door of Florence: Ghiberti’s doors for the Baptistery, narrative scenes ordered in compartments, each with its perspective, and behind them the academic relief of the Salon. Rodin’s leaves have no compartments. Each is one field without ground or horizon. Relief passes into the round and back into the ground, the frame is invaded, and narrative order gives way to everything at once. Nothing stands. Bodies drop head first through the tympanum with nothing to land on, rise and fall across the leaves, and spill over the frame that should hold them.
One narrative is kept. On the left leaf Ugolino crawls over his dying children, the one fully Dantean story at the centre of a field otherwise freed from story. He stays particular, named, a figure out of Dante, while he becomes the father who devours. Paolo and Francesca are there too, and around them nameless lovers fall with them. There is no circle to separate the named from the unnamed, no judge to assign a sentence, and the punishment is no longer something done to the damned. It is the passion itself: the body is where longing and torment happen at once.
Some lovers were taken out. The Kiss, a couple in a full embrace, was removed by Rodin because its embrace did not belong in a hell. The happy lovers left the door by their maker’s decision, and the door kept only the ones who fall. The removal shows what the work admits. It shows something else as well: that a figure could leave the Gates without the Gates ceasing to be themselves. Rodin ran that test on his own work for thirty-seven years, and the door survived every subtraction he made.
Movement IV
In 1900 Rodin held his retrospective in the Pavillon de l’Alma in Paris and showed the door in plaster. He showed the architecture with most of its figures removed: pilasters, lintel, tympanum and leaves, almost empty. The one public sight of the whole in his lifetime was a frame, the work exposed as architecture and absence.
The figures were elsewhere, in lives of their own. The Thinker, The Kiss, Ugolino, The Three Shades, Fugit Amor and The Crouching Woman went out from the door into the world, enlarged, exhibited and sold. For nearly four decades the Gates were the matrix of Rodin’s work. The same body appears again at another angle, the Shades are one cast three times, and the fragment, the repeated cast and the unfinished surface became his means rather than his accidents. The partial figure, the surface as an event under light and sculpture as a process left visible were worked out here, as a system, on one object.
The objection follows: that this is not a work but a storehouse, a quarry worked for forty years, and that what stands is an archive. Part of it holds. A different selection from the same swarm would still be this work, and the frame is calmer and more conventional than the leaves it holds. But a quarry has no tympanum. The undivided field, the door that does not open, and the vertical order of the fall, the Shades and The Thinker hold through the years of work to the last plaster. Rodin died at Meudon in November 1917 with the door neither delivered nor closed.
Movement V
Bronze had been the commission’s material from the start, and in Rodin’s practice the founder’s work was always done by other hands. His donations of 1916 gave the state the right to cast from his models. From 1926 to 1928 the Alexis Rudier foundry cast the door in bronze: one cast for the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, the gift of Jules Mastbaum, and one for the Musée Rodin in Paris. Other casts followed in the twentieth century. Nine to eleven years after its maker’s death, the work was realised in its destined material.
The casting changed it. The plaster’s whiteness and its seams gave way to a dark, unified skin. In plaster the falling bodies are spectral; in bronze, under raking light, the darkness deepens them into terror. The door became metal and weight, set outdoors and in courts as a door is set. What was cast is a state of the form, fixed for casting, of a work its maker never closed. Since the first casts the whole has been continuously in view, in museum gardens and courts open to the public, in several cities on more than one continent, and no single loss could now take it away.
The return began in Rodin’s lifetime. Rilke wrote on the Gates in his monograph on Rodin, first published in 1903; Albert Elsen built a scholarly career on them; Leo Steinberg’s essay on Rodin reread the fragment and the repeated cast through them. The Dantean programme, the Baudelairean one, the autobiographical studio, the laboratory of modern sculpture and the work of assemblage have each been found there in turn. Through Rodin the language reached Bourdelle, Claudel, Lehmbruck and Matisse, and Brancusi by reaction. The door stands where it can be approached and never entered: its leaves do not open, and above them the poet still looks down at what he made.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is the work’s weak point, and Rodin ran it on the work himself. He took The Kiss out because its embrace did not belong in a hell; in 1900 he showed the frame almost empty; figures passed in and out for thirty-seven years. At the level of the part much could go. What resists is the field, leaves without panels or ground, and the vertical order it requires: the fall below, The Thinker above it, the Shades over both. That necessity holds from the first plans to the last plaster, and it clears the cap. What holds the axis lowest is that it is a necessity of density, not of these figures in these places: a different selection from the same swarm would still be this work.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The Gates take Dante’s hell and remove its judge and its order. Ugolino, Paolo and Francesca and nameless lovers fall together, and the punishment is the passion itself. What comes into the open can be stated: desire is its own damnation, the body is the site of longing and torment at once, and above it sits a mind that contemplates what it has imagined and cannot stop it. The Thinker, conceived as the poet and set in the Judge’s seat, turns a picture of hell into consciousness looking at its own hell. That is a meaning, made without a word, and it holds. Held below the top because much of the surface discloses anguish and appetite as feeling rather than as articulated truth.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation here is dreadful, and it recurs across the whole surface: Ugolino crawling over his dying children on the left leaf; bodies dropping head first through the tympanum with no ground to land on; The Three Shades, heads bowed until the necks become a horizontal line, hands meeting at one point; The Thinker in absolute stillness above the fall. The sublime is the scale of it, a swarm of bodies some six metres high, each in its own extremity, read at once as one cataract, and the height never lapses. In bronze, under raking light, the terror deepens; in plaster it turns spectral. Held below 9.0 by saturation: the single summit is muffled, and at distance the leaves read as texture before figures.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, not cited. The governing archetype is the threshold of hell, and the work makes it a door that does not open: the gate one stands before forever, the entrance that is also a wall. The Thinker is the particular made archetype: Dante, then the poet, then the maker, then any mind, seated over the damned as their author and their witness. The Christian portal is kept and emptied, and the emptiness is structural: the tympanum where the Judge should sit holds the poet. Ugolino and Paolo and Francesca stay named and Dantean while becoming the father who devours and the lovers who fall. Held below the top because outside these anchors the swarm evokes rather than constructs.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The inheritance was precise: Ghiberti’s doors for the Baptistery in Florence, the narrative bronze portal of ordered scenes in compartments, with perspective, and behind it the academic relief of the Salon. The departure: the leaves became one undivided field; relief passes into the round and back into the ground; the frame is invaded; narrative order gives way to simultaneity; the fragment, the repeated cast and the unfinished surface become means, not accidents. The stake was paid: a state commission never delivered, thirty-seven years, and a whole seen in Rodin’s lifetime only as an empty frame. Held below the top because the turn was gradual and the extracted figures were shown and sold throughout: the wager was hedged.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The form is in large part the knowledge. A portal is a threshold; a portal that cannot open makes the threshold permanent. Leaves without ground or horizon are the instrument of the hell they show: nothing stands, everything falls or rises, and the passage from low relief through high relief to figures in the round gives the work a gradient from matter to mind. Recast it as separate groups, or in Florentine compartments, and it loses what it most knows: that no frame contains suffering. Held here because the form was never resolved by its maker. The configuration is accretive, the frame is more conventional than the leaves it holds, and the plaster fixes one state of a moving form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence over promise: more than a century of return. Rilke wrote on the Gates in his monograph on Rodin, first published in 1903; Albert Elsen built a scholarly career on them; Leo Steinberg’s essay on Rodin reread the fragment and the repeated cast through them. Each generation has found a different work: the Dantean programme, the Baudelairean one, the autobiographical studio, the laboratory of modern sculpture, the work of assemblage. On the object, return keeps yielding: figures hidden in the depth of the leaves, the same body found again at another angle, the relation of The Thinker’s gaze to what lies beneath it. Held below the top because much of the yield concerns Rodin’s practice rather than what the Gates themselves say.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The intrinsic force is a reorganisation of sculptural possibility: the partial figure, the fragment as finished statement, the cast multiplied and recombined, the surface as an event under light, frame and base dissolved, all worked out on one object as a system. Delayed influence is credited and discounted: the whole was not seen whole in Rodin’s lifetime, nor in bronze until the late 1920s. But the extracted figures are the Gates’ own, and the language they carried was made on the portal, so their reach is its reach. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: The Thinker, The Kiss, Ugolino, The Three Shades, Fugit Amor and The Crouching Woman carried the Gates’ language out, and through Rodin it bears on Bourdelle, Claudel, Lehmbruck, Matisse and, by reaction, Brancusi.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The defining form survives whole: the plaster stands in Paris, and the composition exists in bronze in several cities on more than one continent, protected against any single loss as few monuments are. Presence: since the casts of 1926 to 1928 the whole has been continuously in view in museum gardens and courts open to the public, and its figures have been present since the 1880s in their separate lives; The Thinker is among the most reproduced images in the world. Fabric: the plaster is fragile and outdoor bronze needs patina care: small charges. Held below the top: what survives is a state, fixed for casting, of a form its maker never closed, and the whole was not in view complete until the casts.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The surfaces are broken into planes that hold and release light; anatomy is driven to the edge of possibility without losing weight: the Ugolino group, the Shades’ impossible necks, the hands. The command of scale on one object, from heads a few centimetres high to The Thinker, and the passage from relief to the round, are load-bearing, and the modelling stands with the finest carving in marble. The Rudier casts are faithful and fine. What holds the axis below the top is composition, not command of the surface: some figures on the leaves are repeated by casting rather than modelled for their place, legibility fails at six metres, and the frame is competent rather than inspired.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements, The Thinker’s stillness and the falling bodies of the leaves. They obey one law, bodies under the pull of desire and gravity, rising from the material and returning to it with no ground: the falling is what the mind above sees, and the stillness is the strain of seeing it. The Shades stand at the edge of the same pull, bowed toward it. The wide range, from Dante’s named episodes to nameless lovers and the poet, is held. Three things resist: the pilasters, lintel and cornice obey an older, calmer law than the field they frame; the named episodes and the generic figures are not fully reconciled; and The Thinker’s scale is a hierarchy imposed rather than grown.
Score: 8.2 / 10
For a single sculpture the Gates hold an unusual number of orders: consciousness, in The Thinker; desire and the couple; the family, in Ugolino’s children; age and decay; death; the sacred in its absence, the empty seat of the Judge; the first man, as the Shades are read; and the maker contemplating his own creation. They are integrated by one field and one gaze from above, not listed. What holds the axis where it stands is what Rodin’s hell, narrowed to the body and the mind, lets go: the state, labour, history and the natural order, all of which Dante’s cosmos holds. Against the literary summit the figure describes the form; for a sculpture it is high.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Sublime at 8.9. Modelling that breaks every surface into planes of light and commands scale from a head of a few centimetres to the figure in the tympanum; a language of the fragment and the repeated cast, worked out on one object as a system and carried into modern sculpture by the work’s offspring; and a dread that recurs across six metres of falling bodies under the stillness of the poet.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 7.8: Rodin ran the subtractive test himself, taking out The Kiss, showing the frame almost empty in 1900 and sending figures out to lives of their own, so that the field is necessary while its particular figures are not; and Rodin’s hell, narrowed to the body and the mind, lets go of the state, labour, history and the natural order. Below the rest, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.2: the form was never resolved by its maker, and the frame obeys a calmer law than the field it holds. The four are one fact: a hell narrowed to the body and the mind, in a form its maker kept open for thirty-seven years and never closed.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5, by three tenths. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.2, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 8.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met: Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Swerve at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Imperishable at 8.7 each clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below The Inevitable at 7.8, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which is exempted from the minimum, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The twelve sum to 102.6, an average of 8.55 that displays as 8.6, in Tier IV; every axis condition of the summit is met, and the aggregate alone, four tenths short of 9.0, withholds it.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the work, its full-size plaster in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and its bronzes, and of how it was made and what became of it. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the door as Rodin left it, the plaster, with the posthumous bronze casts as part of the one work: Rodin’s composition, modelling and configuration are read from the plaster, and the work’s material presence (bronze, patina, weight, setting) from the Rudier casts of 1926 to 1928. The casts, made by other hands after the maker’s death under the right to cast that his donations of 1916 gave the state, are credited or charged to the work and never to Rodin; later casts count where they bear on survival and reach. The figures that left the Gates as separate works, among them The Thinker enlarged and The Kiss, are not the work, and their fame counts only as the Gates’ reach. Care of the plaster and of the bronzes’ patina is weighed only as a fact of survival. The work bears no inscription; the one line quoted, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”, is Dante’s (Inferno III, 9), checked against the Italian text, and is not on the Gates. Figures and facts that could not be verified, among them the exact dimensions, the number of figures, the size of The Thinker in the door, the date the plaster was assembled, the number and places of the later casts, who paid for the Paris cast, the site meant for the museum, the form of the first sketches and the sources of single figures, are not given.