The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Auguste Rodin · Le Penseur · a single nude male figure seated on a rock, in bronze, in the round, somewhat over life size · conceived about 1880 for the tympanum of The Gates of Hell, where it was first known as Le Poète, and enlarged for exhibition in 1904 · the cast set outdoors before the Panthéon, Paris, in 1906, and since 1922 on a high stone pedestal in the garden of the Musée Rodin, Paris · scored as the enlarged figure in that cast, whole and unaltered, its patina weathered and maintained; the many other large casts count for survival and presence only, and the reduced and other-scale editions are not scored
Mode
A part of a larger work enlarged as a free monument; the contemplative figure recast as a figure of effort, its surface modelled in planes that catch the light
Mythos
The maker before his creation: Dante over the Inferno, the poet, the artist, then Thought itself; the brooding hero of the Torso and the Pensieroso, made a labourer
Phase
Conceived about 1880 for the tympanum of a door commissioned that year; enlarged for exhibition in 1904; outdoors before the Panthéon from 1906, in the museum garden since 1922
Presentation
Bronze in the round, somewhat over life size, one figure on a rough rock; outdoors on a high stone pedestal, seen from below against the sky
Register
Gravity: mass bent down under its own weight, shadow gathered between head, arms and knees, held at one pitch
Scale
One body, one gesture, one rock
Governing Proposition
A naked man sits on a rough rock with his head bowed onto the back of his right hand, and the right elbow, crossed over, rests on the left thigh, so that the whole trunk turns against itself; his toes curl over the edge of the stone. He was made to lean out of the tympanum of a door over the damned, and he was taken out of the door, enlarged and set alone. The wager of the figure is that thought can be shown as labour done by the whole body, the body of a worker and not of a sage, and that this one proposition, held in bronze by a single figure with nothing to look at, can stand without the hell it was made to watch.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1880 the French state commissioned bronze doors from Auguste Rodin for a museum of decorative arts in Paris that was never built. The subject was Dante’s hell, and the doors became The Gates of Hell. At the centre of their tympanum, above the leaves, Rodin set a seated naked man, leaning out over the bodies that fall and crawl below him. He was known first as Le Poète: Dante before his Inferno, or the maker before what he has made, seated where a Christian portal puts its Judge.
In the door every part of him was compelled by a place. He leans because there is a pit below him; he looks down because the damned are there; he is still because everything under him moves. Out of that place Rodin took him, and had him enlarged for exhibition in 1904 as a free monument, somewhat over life size, alone on his rock. A figure made for one place in a larger work was treated as a whole work, which became one of Rodin’s methods. The lean was kept. Its reason stayed in the door.
The work scored here is the second figure, not the first: the enlarged bronze, in the cast that stands in the garden of the Musée Rodin in Paris. One body carries two meanings, the poet over his Inferno and the man alone on a rock, and the unit is the second. The door is a separate work, scored on its own account at 8.6. What the single figure keeps of it, and what it lets go, is the question every axis of this page has to answer.
Movement II
The pose is exact. The head is bowed, the chin resting on the back of the right hand. The right elbow is set on the left thigh, not the right, so that the trunk turns across itself. The left forearm lies along the left knee with the hand hanging. The feet are planted, and the toes curl over the edge of the rock. There is no attribute and no inscription: one figure, one base, nothing else to read.
The crossed elbow is the work’s decision. A man who props his chin on the arm of the same side is resting; a man who brings it across to the far knee is holding himself in a twist that the eye has to travel round and the spine has to bear. That strain turns repose into labour. The tradition of the contemplative figure, Michelangelo’s seated Lorenzo de’ Medici, the melancholics after Dürer, shows thought as withdrawal, the body at rest and the mind away. Here the mind is present in the clenched foot, and the body of the thinker is the body of a worker, heavy, naked and thick, not of a sage.
That proposition is the whole of the disclosure, and it holds. It is also all of it. The figure states its one thing at once, with every part, and a second look finds the same thing stated again. The inheritance is plain: the Belvedere Torso is recalled in the back and thighs, Michelangelo’s Pensieroso in the bowed head, Carpeaux’s Ugolino of the 1860s, another figure out of Dante, in the seated strain. Of all Rodin’s major figures this is the most classical and the most closed, legible to a Salon of the 1880s and admired as soon as it was shown; the fragment, the Balzac and the Walking Man went further and paid for it.
Movement III
One law governs the figure from top to bottom, compression inward and downward. The head bends to the hand, the hand to the knee, the arm across the body, the toes into the rock, the rock under the weight. Every part bends toward the centre of the figure and nothing escapes it, and the twist the crossed elbow brings is the law at its strongest, not a break in it. The rough-hewn base and the modelled flesh are worked by the same hand, so that the man seems to rise out of his stone, and thought reaches the ground through the curled toes.
The modelling is of the first rank. The back is a landscape of planes, each catching the light. The hand is pressed into the jaw so that the jaw shifts. The thick neck carries the head down with real weight. Seen from the front or the side the figure closes into a compact block; from three-quarters it opens into the twist. The surface is never smoothed, and the light breaks on the lumps of muscle as attention breaks on a problem, while the hollows between head, arms and knees hold shadow. In bronze, dark and heavy and weathered outdoors, the metal is the weight.
The enlargement has costs. It was made mechanically by a professional enlarger, with Rodin reworking the surface, as was the standard practice. At the larger size the musculature is inflated beyond what the thought requires; the thighs and the shoulders read in places as bulk rather than structure, and from the front the head is small against the body. The large figure knows what the small one knew. The change of scale alters where and how it speaks, a public monument seen from below, more than what it knows.
Movement IV
In 1906 this cast was set outdoors on the steps of the Panthéon in Paris, and it has stood outdoors ever since. There the figure carried a meaning the door could not give it: a naked workman, thinking, before the temple of the great men. The poet who had looked down on the damned now sat at the threshold of a civic shrine. It was the same body and a new address, and it showed how much of the figure’s meaning would from then on be supplied by where it stood.
Since 1922 it has stood in the garden of the Musée Rodin on a high stone pedestal, and it is seen from below, against the sky. From there it has real grandeur. The mass bends under its own weight, darkness collects in the hollows, and the shadow the hand throws across the face is the work’s one summit, present at every hour. The register does not change: there is no terror and no tenderness in it, and the weight sometimes reads as heaviness rather than height. It rises once and stays at that pitch.
Alone, the figure has lost its Dante. In the door the archetype was particular, the poet before his own hell; on the pedestal it becomes general, Thought or Man, and leans toward allegory. The single figure holds the body, consciousness, labour, the maker and a rock, and integrates them in one gesture. It cannot hold what the door held round it: the damned, the sacred, love and death, the crowd of the leaves. It has no world to look at and no one with it.
Movement V
The figure is whole. Nothing is lost and no later hand has altered it; the enlarged form has survived 122 years and its conception about 146. Many large casts stand in public places on several continents, so the image is carried redundantly and the damage of any one cast cannot touch the work. Its presence is as wide as that of any sculpture of the modern era, and the type of the thinking man became this one, in monuments, in images and in parody. That is presence more than pressure. In sculpture the reach was shared: what Brâncuși, Matisse and Lehmbruck took from Rodin, the partial figure and the surface as process, came more from his other figures than from this one.
The questions that stay open are mostly about the figure’s use. Who he is: Dante, the artist, Adam, a damned soul, the worker, Rodin himself. Why the right elbow sits on the left knee, and whether the discomfort of the pose is the meaning or a sculptor’s choice for the profile. Whether the figure is changed by losing its door. Return to the object yields less than return to the door, because the form is closed and grasped whole at once. The emblem, the parodies and the casts fill much of the well.
The desk sets it 0.3 below The Gates of Hell, which keeps the hell this figure was made to watch, its swerve and its reach; under Giacometti’s Walking Man I at 8.5 and Brâncuși’s Bird in Space at 8.4, through which the turn of modern sculpture ran; level with the Winged Victory of Samothrace at 8.3; and a tenth under Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, the nearest single contemplative figure on the desk. The figure is a superb modelled body stating one proposition. It sits in the garden with its head on its hand and its toes in the stone, a poet without his door, stating with the whole body the one thing it knows.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test on one body. The bowed head cannot go, nor the hand under the chin: they are the act. The crossed elbow cannot go: right arm to left thigh forces the trunk into a twist the eye has to travel round, and that strain is what separates this figure from every relaxed melancholy before it. The curled toes cannot go: thought reaches the ground through them. The rock cannot go; it is what the weight presses on. What gives is the enlargement itself. In the tympanum every part was compelled by a place, and the figure leaned because there was a pit below him. Set alone and enlarged, the lean is kept and its reason is gone, and the swollen musculature is more than the thought requires. Every part is required; the scale is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What can be stated as true: thought is labour, done by the whole body, and the body of the thinker is the body of a worker, not of a sage. The tradition of the contemplative figure, Michelangelo’s seated Lorenzo de’ Medici and the melancholics after Dürer, shows thought as withdrawal, the body at rest and the mind away. Rodin shows it as exertion, the mind present in the clenched foot. That holds, and it is disclosed through the image alone. Held below the gate on two counts. The disclosure is one proposition, stated by the whole figure at once, and it does not deepen: a second look teaches no second thing. And the meaning the figure had in the door, the poet who must look at what he has made, belongs to the door. Alone, the thinker thinks of nothing in particular.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Elevation of one kind: gravity, mass bent down under its own weight, darkness collected in the hollows between the arms, the head and the knees. Seen from below on its pedestal against the sky, as this cast is seen, the figure has real grandeur, and the shadow the hand throws across the face is its one summit, frequent because it is there at every hour. Its places are few: the bowed head, the knot of arms and knees, the hard edge where the back turns. What limits it is one register, with no terror and no tenderness, and a weight that sometimes reads as heaviness rather than height. Read fresh, without its fame, it rises once and stays at that pitch, where The Gates of Hell, at 8.9, rise and fall over a whole field.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Built more than evoked, though less here than in the door. The figure is the maker before his creation: Dante over the Inferno, and behind him every poet who must face what he has made. The pose fuses the brooding hero of the classical type, the Belvedere Torso recalled in the back and thighs, with Michelangelo’s Pensieroso and the melancholy of Saturn’s children. The archetype bears load in the body: the creator is heavy, naked, unprivileged, made of the same clay as the damned. The particular holds: this is a specific, thick, labouring man, not an idealised god. Held below the gate because alone and enlarged the figure loses its Dante, so that the archetype becomes general, Thought or Man, and leans toward allegory; and much of its standing as the emblem of thinking is reception, which is not credited.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is the heroic nude and the seated contemplative figure: the Torso, Michelangelo, and Carpeaux’s Ugolino of the 1860s, itself a figure out of Dante. The departure is real and of two kinds. The body is modelled as a living surface broken into lumps and planes that catch the light, not closed in an academic contour, and the thought is put into strain rather than repose. And a figure made for one place in a larger work is taken out and enlarged as a free monument, a part treated as a whole, which Rodin made a method. But in this figure the departure is moderate. It is the most classical, closed and Michelangelesque of Rodin’s major figures, legible to a Salon of the 1880s, and it was admired as soon as it was shown. The fragment, the Balzac and the Walking Man swerve further, and paid for it. The lowest of the five gated axes.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Would another form change what the work knows? Largely, yes. Thought as bodily effort is known only through a body in the round, whose twist must be walked round and whose weight bears on stone: in a painting the crossed elbow is an oddity of pose; in bronze it is a torsion felt in the spine. The surface carries the knowledge, the light breaking on the lumps of muscle as attention breaks on a problem, the hollows holding shadow where the figure closes on itself. The metal matters too: dark, heavy bronze, weathered outdoors, is the weight. Held below the top because the enlargement adds size without adding form. The large figure knows what the small one knew, and the change of scale alters its address, a public monument seen from below, more than its knowledge. The best of the form was found in the door.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Evidence over promise: more than a century of looking, and some questions stay open. Who he is: Dante, the artist, Adam, a damned soul, the worker, Rodin himself, and whether the figure is changed by losing its door. Why the right elbow sits on the left knee, and whether the discomfort of the pose is the meaning or a sculptor’s choice for the profile. What the figure meant set before the Panthéon in 1906, a nude workman at the temple of the great men. But return to the object yields less than return to the door. The form is closed and grasped whole at once; the open questions are mostly about its context and its use, and much of the well is reception, the emblem, the parodies, the casts. One proposition, deeply held, and a limited second yield.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is European sculpture from 1880 to 1910. The intrinsic force is moderate to strong: the figure recast the contemplative figure as one of effort, put a modelled, light-breaking surface on a public monument at heroic scale, and stands for the extraction of a part from a larger work, which Rodin made a method. In sculpture its reach is real but shared, since what later sculptors took from Rodin came more from the fragments, the Balzac and the Walking Man than from this figure. In the culture at large its reach is wider than that of any sculpture of its century, and that is presence as much as pressure, credited only in part. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Brâncuși, Matisse and Lehmbruck, the partial figure and the surface as process, drawn mostly from other works; and the type of the thinking man, which became this one, in monuments, in images and in parody. Below Fountain at 9.5 and The Large Bathers at 9.4, which moved their field more.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The figure stands complete, nothing lost, no later hand altering it; the enlarged figure has survived 122 years and its conception about 146. Presence: as wide as any sculpture of the modern era, in continuous view since 1904, the image carried redundantly by many casts in public places on several continents, so that a cast may be damaged without the work suffering, which is the strength of an edition. Wide presence earns the tenth the scale allows and no more; fame is not taken as proof. Fabric: bronze, the most durable of the modeller’s media; this cast has stood outdoors since 1906, its patina weathered and maintained, a small charge. Nothing in the surface is fixed to its moment: no costume, no event. The widest presence for its span, held there by the outdoor fabric.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Command of modelling in clay for bronze, and it is very high. The back is a landscape of planes, each catching the light; the feet grip; the hand under the chin is pressed into the jaw so that the jaw shifts; the thick neck carries the head down with real weight. The whole is drawn so that from the front and the side the figure closes into a compact block and from three-quarters it opens into the twist. The surface, never smoothed, bears load. The charges: the enlargement was made mechanically by a professional enlarger, with Rodin reworking it, the standard practice; at the large size the musculature is inflated, some passages, the thighs and the shoulders, read as bulk rather than structure, and from the front the head is small against the body. Under The Large Bathers’ 8.8 in nothing; under Las Meninas’ 9.8 by the distance between a supreme figure and a supreme field.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the bowed head at the top and the rough rock at the bottom. They obey one law, compression inward and downward: the head bends to the hand, the hand to the knee, the arm across the body, the toes into the rock, the rock under the weight. The rough-hewn base and the modelled flesh are worked by the same hand, so that the man seems to rise out of his stone. Every part bends toward the centre of the figure, and nothing escapes it; the twist that the crossed elbow brings is not a break but the strongest instance of the law. Held because narrowness is not coherence: one figure, one gesture and a rock are a small territory to govern. Wholly lawful within its range, and the range is the smallest a figure can have.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The orders held: the body, at full strength; consciousness, which the work exists to show; labour, in the worker’s body put to thinking; art, in the poet and maker; and the natural order only in the rock. They are integrated in one gesture: the body is the mind’s labour. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what the single figure cannot hold and the door could: the sacred and the damned, history, the family, love and death, the crowd of the leaves. Alone, the figure has no world to look at and no one with it. The mark describes the form: one seated figure holds what one figure can, and holds it closely. Level with For the Love of God and Broadway Boogie Woogie at 6.6, under the company of fourteen in The Large Bathers.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.2, then The Made at 8.9, then The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.5. A figure whole in bronze for 122 years, its image carried by many casts in public places with a presence as wide as any modern sculpture’s; modelling of the first rank in the back, the hands and the feet, the surface never smoothed and bearing load; a knowledge, thought as bodily effort, that exists only in a body in the round whose twist must be walked round; and one law of compression from the bowed head to the rock.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: one figure holds the body, consciousness, labour, the maker and a rock, and lets go of the damned, the sacred, history, the family, love and death that the door held round it. Below the rest of the twelve, The Swerve at 7.9: the most classical and closed of Rodin’s major figures, in the tradition and admired at once. Then The Bottomless Well at 8.0 and The Unconcealment at 8.1: one proposition, held deeply, that a second look does not deepen. The four are one fact: the poet taken out of his door keeps its idea of the mind and not its hell.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.5, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.2 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, The Unconcealment at 8.1 and The Swerve at 7.9 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below The Swerve at 7.9, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 99.1, an average of 8.26 that displays 8.3, in Tier IV, three tenths above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the figure, its pose, proportion, surface and siting, and of how it came out of The Gates of Hell; known better as an image and a form than as a document. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the enlarged bronze, enlarged for exhibition in 1904, in the cast that was set outdoors before the Panthéon in 1906 and has stood since 1922 on a high stone pedestal in the garden of the Musée Rodin, Paris. Nothing of it is lost, restored or replaced; its patina is weathered and maintained, and that is weighed only on The Imperishable. The enlargement was made mechanically by a professional enlarger and reworked by Rodin, the ordinary practice of the medium, and it is credited and charged to the work. The figure as first modelled for the tympanum of the door, about 1880, is context and is part of a separate work, scored on its own page; the many other large casts count only for survival and presence; reduced and other-scale editions are not scored. The figure carries no words, and nothing is quoted: a remark of Rodin’s about the figure that is widely reported is not given, because its words could not be verified. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the figure’s height and the height of the figure in the door, the dates of the enlargement before 1904, the date this cast was made and its founder, the enlarger’s name, whether this was the first large bronze, how the siting of 1906 was paid for and how it was received, and the number and places of the other large casts, among them one at Rodin’s grave and one damaged in the twentieth century.