Rodin Museum Garden, Paris Editorial Image

Scenery of Rodin Museum in Paris France, showing two famous sculptures - In the foreground, Ugolino and his children; Circa 1881, and The Shade, in the background. Auguste Rodin (1840 -1917). Known as one of the most gifted figurative sculptors in history, Auguste Rodin made such iconic works of art as The Kiss (1880-1881), The Thinker (1881-1882), and The Burghers of Calais (1884-1895). Using clay, plaster molds, and a meticulous process that included live models, Rodin created sculptures that were innovative in their attention to detail and unprecedented realism. Rodin must have been very impressed by Carpeaux’s Ugolino (1861, Musée d’Orsay), the famous sculpture whose dramatic subject was drawn from Dante’s Divine Comedy. Twenty years later, after receiving the commission for The Gates of Hell, he made several sketches of this Dantesque theme dear to the Romantics: imprisoned, driven crazy by hunger, Ugolino, Count of Gheradesca, devoured his dead children, a crime for which he was eternally damned.nIn his group on The Gates , Rodin depicted the dramatic scene just before it reached its climax : Ugolino is crawling over the bodies of his dying children, but has not yet given in to his instincts. Naked, grimacing, on all fours, this desperate man has lost all sense of human dignity. His pose was both humiliating and original in the art of Rodin’s day.