Rodin_2011

be surprised if I tell you that the first hour I was in Florence I made a study after Michelangelo and I believe that the great magician is giving me some of his secrets. 2

The important comment in this letter is “ on analyse pas la première fois ce que l’on voit.” In fact, Rodin’s drawings are not just simple copies but analyses through reprisal and repetition, most likely done from memory. Our three drawings are part of this ensemble. Rodin carefully preserved all the drawings he made while in the chapel, even the most basic. His desire to learn by intimately understanding the forms created by Michelangelo is what helps to explain the transformations he made, the most striking of which is the feminizing of figures, and the addition of children. In such a way, Rodin reconciled his own contemporary compositions, in which the dominant theme is that of the young mother and child, with the discoveries of the master of the Renaissance. The drawing seen on the left ( a ) Reclining Woman with Child is inspired by Night, the Tomb of Julian de Medici . One can see the similarity of pose with the figure’s veiled breasts drawn in a Michelangelesque style, as though female appendages had been added to a manly body. The gesture of the right arm has been changed in order to show the finely drawn hand caressing the baby that Rodin has added to the composition. The same motif appears in the drawing in the Rodin Museum collection, in which the mother’s gesture is summarily drawn, while the children and the folds of the dress are finely worked. The very beautiful center drawing ( b ) is not a study inspired by a Madonna but is in fact a feminized version of Lorenzo de Medici . Like Lorenzo, the figure in Seated woman with children strikes a thoughtful pose, with her left elbow on the left knee, the left hand on the left leg and the elbow up. The position of the legs is also similar to that of Lorenzo, although Rodin has added two putti on the lap of the seated figure. In some ways, it constitutes a sort of pendant to Seated woman with a child at the center of the composition on Boucher’s sheet ( d9443 ). It is interesting to note that until now, these very important drawings had been connected to figures of Madonnas with children; no one had been able to identify the original models who are in fact not sweet virgins, but valiant Tuscany princes. 3 The third drawing ( c ) was probably inspired by the figure of the Dawn, and here again, a putto was added to the foreground. Rodin reproduced this subject at least 3 times: d291 , d278 , and on the Boucher sheet, in the center left, all in the collection Rodin Museum, Paris. We believe that these three drawings were once part of the larger sheet comprised of 30 mounted drawings that once belonged to Boucher (fig. 1 ). Rodin had removed this sheet from what we now know as Album II in the collection of the Musée Rodin which Rodin himself donated to the museum in 191 6 and which Georges Grappe broke apart for exhibition purposes in 1930 . A drawing of a putto now in the collection of the Dubois-Alfred Boucher Museum of Nogent-sur-Seine, was also probably part of this same larger sheet.