Through me the way into the suffering city,
Through me the way to the eternal pain,
Through me the way that runs among the lost.
Justice urged on my high artificer;
My Maker was Divine authority,
The highest Wisdom, and the primal Love.
Before me nothing but eternal things
Were made, and I endure eternally.
Abandon every hope, who enter here.
— DANTE, Inferno, 3.1–9
These are the lines Auguste Rodin supposedly chose to represent in his Dantean masterpiece, The Gates of Hell.
“For a whole year I lived with Dante, with him alone, drawing the eight circles of his inferno,” Rodin told Le Matin. “At the end of this year, I realized that while my drawing rendered my vision of Dante, they had become too remote from reality. So I started all over again, working from nature, with my models.”
The artist’s dream is officially realized with the stamp of a State commission in 1879, when the Under-Secretary for Fine Arts offered Auguste Rodin the opportunity to create a work for the public. Obsessed with his readings of Dante, Rodin asked for permission to create a doorway for the planned Museum of Decorative Arts, a threshold between interior and exterior based on the first section of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, from the Inferno.
For the next two decades, The Gate of Hell would consume Rodin’s thoughts and work. He missed the 1885 deadline for the commission. Even at his death, Rodin’s gate remained unfinished, its fragments scattered, quoted, reshaped into various sculptures and pieces that rest across the museums of the world.
The 186 figures and characters of The Gate of Hell never stop moving through fear, despair, erotic hunger, the lyric of horror and life.
Excruciating tenderness distinguishes my favorite detail from The Gate (pictured below).
— and the extraordinary hands, the way agony is carried in the curl in the fingers.
I remember sitting on the cold stone stairs outside a cathedral in Paris, smoking a cigarette and scribbling nonsense about Dante in my notebook. Who knows what became of those notes?
(Rodin published his cathedral-inspired sketches in Les Cathédrales de France in 1910.)
Rodin’s famous statue, The Thinker, was sourced from The Gate of Hell, where Rodin located him above the door panels, calling him “The Poet”, a god-like figure stationed at a central point, perched atop a rock looking down on the endless anguish of creation.
The Kiss also began as part of Rodin’s conception for the commission, intended to symbolize the pleasure prior to final damnation, but Rodin removed it, sensing something in that kiss that was alien to the suffering around it.
Other notable sculptures that first appeared in The Gates of Hell include: Ugolino and His Children (according to the story, Ugolino ate the corpses of his children after they died by starvation); The Three Shades, an over-life size group that originally pointed to the phrase “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here”; Fleeting Love, inspired by the story of Francesca da Rimini’s love affair with Paolo Malatesta, a medieval tale of adultery and murder; and Meditation, which appears on the rightmost part of the tympanum, later used for the celebrated Monument to Victor Hugo.
“Because of the complexity of art, or rather of the human souls who take art for a language, all classification runs the risk of being futile,” Rodin told Paul Gsell. Thus, “Rembrandt is often a sublime poet and Raphael often a vigorous realist.” But our efforts to “understand the masters” runs the risk of fetishizing the classification through we purport to know them. “Let us love them,” Rodin continues, “let us go to them for inspiration; but let us refrain from labelling them like drugs in a chemist’s shop.”
“[The artist] is, as Dante said of Virgil, ‘their guide, their master, and their friend,” Rodin told Paul Gsell.