Rodin_2011

13. Small Shade from the Gates of Hell ( Petite Ombre de la Porte de l’Enfer ; also known as Small Shade no. 1)

Conceived 1885 , cast between 190 6 and 1911 Sand-cast bronze with black patina, nuances of green and blue 12 3 ⁄ 8 x 3 ¾ in. ( 31 . 4 x 9 .6 cm) Signed on right side of rock

provenance Georges Renand, Paris (by 1930 ); thence by descent; acquired by present owner Sotheby’s Paris, December 13 , 2007 ; Private Collection. literature Georges Grappe, Catalogue du Museé Rodin, vol. I. Hôtel Biron , Paris, 1927 , no. 121 ; Ionel Jianou and Cécile Goldscheider, Rodin , Paris, 19 6 7 , p. 90 ; John Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin: The Collection of the Rodin Museum, Philadelphia , Philadelphia, pp. 130 – 32 ; Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Rodin et le Bronze , Paris, 2007 , vol. II, p. 574 ; Jérôme Le Blay , Catalogue critique de l’oeuvre scuolpté d’Auguste Rodin (in preparation), Paris, no. 2007 V 1550 B. In 1880 , Rodin received the commission for The Gates of Hell , a monumental project which, though it remained unfinished, would ultimately transform Rodin’s approach to the figure. The portals were for a new Museum of Decorative Arts that was to be erected on the site of the former Cour de Comptes, destroyed in the Commune in 1871 . The doors would be based on a bas-relief representing Dante’s Divine Comedy . While literary matter was new to Rodin, he chose the subject and was especially eager to take it on, as if offered him the opportunity to model small figures—and thus to refute the charges leveled at The Age of Bronze . “I had no idea,” he later said, “of interpreting Dante, though I was glad to accept the Inferno as a starting point, because I wished to do something in small, nude figures . . . to prove completely that I could model from life as well as other sculptors, I determined to make the sculpture of figures smaller than life.” 1 It is indeed fascinating that Rodin’s approach to this physically monumental project, which also represented artistic ambition on an immense scale, was to envision a great assemblage of many small figures, and that it was precisely the small size of the figures that inspired him. Rodin would continue to work on the Gates until around 1900 , though the project remained unfinished at his death. It is known to us through photographs of lifetime models in plaster and posthumous bronze casts, but mostly through the individual figures from the Gates . It is in the conception and modeling of these small figures that the Gates constitutes a critical turning point in Rodin’s oeuvre. The figures quickly took on a life of their own, apart from the portals, not only in exhibitions during Rodin’s lifetime, but during the process of creating and refining them. As Tancock has discussed at length, the technical requirements of the portals, including the necessity of