Rodin: The shape of things
In the winter of 1875 Auguste Rodin was 35 years old and riding the train from Brussels, where he was earning his keep decorating public buildings, to Italy, where he was beginning a lifelong habit of collecting artwork. The coach stopped in Reims, in northeastern France, and he had a good look at its famed mediaeval Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Thirty-three years later, when he was 68, he placed together two larger-than-life casts of of the same right hand and called the result “The Cathedral”. By then he had become the most celebrated sculptor of his era, and yet for every acknowledgement of his unparallelled sensitivity in wringing human emotion from clay and plaster and stone and metal, it seemed there was a dear price to pay. See the rest.
