Rodin Sculptures [antikvár]

E Auguste Rodin and his Work Very great thinker is a mystery and a puzzle to his contemporaries. Auguste Rodin was not only the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo, but he was the greatest thinker in stone of modern times, perhaps ever since the prehistoric age when men first began to think it possible to shape in stone the presentments of living things. Who will venture to contemplate his wonderful collection of groups, figures and busts, and not require some guidance in the master's meaning? There is the great art and the technique, than which none are more remarkable, and behind these there is the soul in his work. How are we to read that soul? The Burghers of Calais, for instance (PI. 41 ). This is not merely a group of six men marching off to execution, but every man in the group is alive with character and with a meaning which those who will may read. The St. John has a significance different from the mystical figures of the Prophet with which centuries of religious art have familiarized us. So with his Venuses, his allegorical figures, his Naiads, his studies of men (and one is struck with how much more frequently, in comparison with some other sculptors, he depicts the force of man rather than the grace of woman). And his Balzac (Pis. 63-7)— was it without deep thought that such a man represented the author of the 'Comédie Humaine' as he did, in a way that set all the critics and dilettantes agog? Rodin himself realized that his meaning was sometimes hard to fathom. "I am," he said once, "like the Roman singer who replied to the yells of the populace, 'Equitibus cano'—I only sing for the knights" (that is, for the select few). All great thinkers and artists have felt this at times. Yet Rodin contradicted this, as he was right to do, when he left all his work to the nation with a view to helping others to attain education in art. He knew that nothing great and durable can really be for the few, either in art or in any other manifestation of human activity, and Rodin is for the world, as he wished to be. rodin's life Auguste rodin was a Parisian, born in a working-class quarter, close to the Latin Quarter—No. 3, rue de l'Arbalete—on November 12, 1840. His father, Jean-Baptiste Rodin, a native of Normandy, born at Yvetot, a modest office employee at the time his son was bom, later became an inspector at the Prefecture of Police. His mother, Marie Cheffer, was from Lorraine. The family seems to have been very united and highly religious. Rodin was the younger of two children. His sister, who was two years older than he, became a nun, but died in 1862 after a short illness. He had been