AIC: Auguste Rodin

Adam - by Auguste Rodin

Adam - by Auguste Rodin
Bronze - 1881

The marker reads..
Adam and Eve were originally intended to flank Rodin's monumental... "Gates of Hell", the bronze door that was commissioned by the French government for a new museum of decorative arts. The inclusion of these biblical figures in the depiction of a scene from Dante's "Inferno" would have stressed the legacy of original sin. The museum was never built, and the doorway never finished. So Rodin turned these figures into independent statues..

Eve after the Fall - by Auguste Rodin

Eve after the Fall - by Auguste Rodin
Marble- 1886

The marker reads..
Auguste Rodin's sculpture "Eve" owes it's genesis to the "Gates of Hell", the artists major commission from the French government in 1800. The associations posed by these sculptural portals of that project led Rodin back to the art of Lorenzo Ghiberti and Michelangelo, particularly their depiction of biblical stories from the book of Genesis. A number of elements from the Gates - such as The Thinker, Adam, and Eve - gradually evolved into independent events. In Particular, Eve recalls the most sculptural of Renaissance paintings. Michelangelo's panels from the Sistine Chapel and Masaccio's "Expulsion from the Garden of Eden". It's naturalism shocked critics when it was first exhibited, since Eve seems to them more like a flesh-and-blood woman than an idealized creation...