Few works of art are as well-known today as “The Thinker” by French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The monumental nature of this single monolithic figure seems to be all self-sufficient, capable of symbolizing the most sophisticated of human activity—thinking. It’s no wonder that this image, ever since its rise to popularity in 1903, has been the most frequently used work of art to represent philosophy.
Dante Contemplating Suffering
Before it became familiar to us as a large stand-alone figure, “The Thinker” was actually conceived as part of a larger sculptural group. In 1880, Rodin was commissioned to cast the entrance to the planned Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris.Inspired by his reading of Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” Rodin modeled the monumental “Gates of Hell” with scenes from Dante’s poetry. Embedded in turbulent waves of bronze, small figures from various episodes of the “Inferno” act out their respective sufferings: Paolo and Francesca, damned for their adulterous lust, are swept by violent winds; the starving Ugolino is driven to eat his children as punishment for treason and treachery.
Above the doors in the tympanum and among twisted and intertwined flesh, sits “The Thinker”—a serene representation of the poet Dante—contemplating the vision of infernal suffering in which he finds himself.
This is no conventional depiction of Dante. Known to us as the red-robed poet laureate, the medieval Florentine had never appeared as a nude athlete. Rodin’s sculpture thus brings the specificity of the historical figure to a symbolic level, celebrating the great profundity of his thought through the force of classical figuration.
For this, the artist reached back to the sculpture of Greco-Roman antiquity and its intermediary, the Renaissance, through which ancient art was again expressed. Rodin’s admiration for the power of Michelangelo’s sculptures led him not only to imitate the master’s style but also to go directly to the fountainhead of that classical movement.
In Rome, Rodin studied the city’s wealth of ancient statues. He must have intimately known the famous fragment of the “Belvedere Torso,” present in Rome since the 1430s, which had inspired generations of artists from Michelangelo to Peter Paul Rubens. Created about 2,000 years ago, the broken torso still captures the restrained power that rests in the classical nude body, which can be glimpsed through its charged compression of the abdomen and the subtle turning of the shoulders.
Inspired by the fractured remains of antiquity and Michelangelo’s unfinished marbles, Rodin would later go on to explore that aesthetic with his intentionally fragmentary works. His later sculptural works, however, were not as traditional. But in “The Thinker,” the sculptor reinterpreted the powerful torso with limbs and a head, just as Michelangelo once did in his Sistine frescoes.
In the end, what Rodin invented was something thoroughly unique, which endowed the ancient and the classic with new meanings. The heroic Greek nude passed through the tensed dynamism of Michelangelo to Rodin, who used all its simplicity and clarity to express the force of a poet’s creative idea.
Upon the jagged rock sits the thinker. Though each stripe of muscle is pronounced, the entire body remains still, expressing no explicit drama yet containing a sea of emotion. Paradoxically, the turning of the torso, facilitated by the crossing elbow, reveals a powerfully contorted pose of the seemingly tranquil image.
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