The Gates of Hell - Auguste Rodin
The Work
Auguste Rodin's Gates of Hell is a monumental bronze door measuring 635 × 400 × 85 centimeters, now existing in seven bronze casts (the first was completed posthumously in 1926) in Paris, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Zurich, Tokyo, Seoul, and San Francisco. Rodin worked on the project continuously from 1880 until his death in 1917 - a period of thirty-seven years - without ever seeing the plaster model cast in bronze during his lifetime. The commission came from the French government for a pair of decorative doors for a planned Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris; the museum was never built, but Rodin continued working on the doors as a total artistic project and a vehicle for his central sculptural explorations. Of the 186 figures that populate the final composition, many were extracted as independent works - The Thinker, The Kiss, The Three Shades, Fugit Amor - that became among the most recognized sculptures in the world.
Biblical Source
The Gates of Hell draw primarily on Dante's Inferno (the inscription above Dante's Hell gate: 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here'), but the biblical theology of divine judgment that underlies Dante's vision is explicitly present. Matthew 25:46 ('they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life') provides the eschatological framework; Revelation 20:15 ('anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire') supplies the apocalyptic imagery. Luke 16:24 (the rich man's torment in Hades) and Revelation 19:20 (the beast thrown into the lake of burning sulfur) amplify the biblical hell theology that Dante systematized. Rodin was a lapsed Catholic who retained profound interest in the biblical tradition, and the Gates represent his secular engagement with the Christian doctrine of judgment.
Artist and Commission
The commission was given by the Directorate of Fine Arts in 1880. Rodin was given a studio in the Dépôt des Marbres and a small annual stipend. He immediately began preparatory work: studies of individual figures, sketches of overall compositions, and experiments with the relationship between architectural frame and figural mass. As the planned museum was repeatedly postponed and finally abandoned, Rodin continued working on the Gates for his own artistic reasons, treating them as a laboratory for his sculptural innovations. The figures extracted as independent works - The Thinker was originally called The Poet and represented Dante above the gates - developed their own exhibition and commercial lives separate from the overall composition.
Iconography
The Gates' surface is not organized according to a conventional narrative program but according to what Rodin called the 'streaming' of figures: bodies in various states of torment, ecstasy, despair, and longing surge across the surface in a continuous flow that has neither beginning nor end. The Thinker - the commanding figure seated in the lunette above the two doors - broods over the condemned souls below in an attitude that condenses the entire tradition of the contemplative pose (melancholia, the scholar in meditation, the Christ in Gethsemane). The Three Shades at the apex - three identical male figures with arms hanging limp - represent the multiplied self confronting death, an image drawn from Dante but expressing Rodin's obsession with the body's vulnerability. The lovers throughout the composition - Ugolino and his children, Paolo and Francesca, countless anonymous pairs - embody the Dantesque argument that human passion, unchecked, leads to its own destruction.
Art Historical Significance
The Gates of Hell is the most ambitious sculptural project of the nineteenth century and the work that established modern sculpture's capacity for programmatic complexity comparable to the great architectural sculpture of the medieval cathedrals. Rodin's treatment of the figure as a fragment - incomplete, in motion, caught between states - revolutionized sculptural aesthetics and directly influenced the modernist sculptors who followed: Brancusi, Giacometti, and Henry Moore all engaged with the formal problems Rodin opened. The Gates are also the source of Rodin's most recognized independent works, making them the origin point for a significant portion of the modern sculptural canon.
Theological Interpretations
Rodin's engagement with the biblical theme of hell was neither orthodox nor dismissive. The human figures in the Gates are not caricatured sinners receiving just deserts; they are suffering humans whose experience invites compassion rather than judgment. This humanizes the hell imagery in a way that some theologians have found valuable - it takes seriously the reality of human suffering and the consequences of moral choice without the mechanistic legalism of some traditional hell imagery. The Thinker's meditative posture over the tormented figures below suggests the question: what does it mean to think about suffering? The Gates thus function simultaneously as a visual meditation on Matthew 25:46 and as a counter-argument to any reading of hell as merely punitive.
Controversies
The Gates were never completed to Rodin's satisfaction. The question of whether the plaster models should have been cast in bronze after his death - without his final review and authorization - has occasionally been raised, though the casts are now universally accepted as authentic works. More significantly, the project's thirty-seven-year incompletion has been interpreted as evidence of Rodin's perfectionism, his changing artistic ambitions, or the impossibility of adequately representing the subject.
Legacy
The independent works extracted from the Gates - The Thinker, The Kiss, The Three Shades - are among the most reproduced sculptures in the world. The Thinker in particular has become a universal symbol of intellectual contemplation, appearing in countless parodies, appropriations, and homages across popular culture. The Gates themselves are among the most visited works of monumental sculpture.
Visiting the Work
The primary cast is at the Musée Rodin in Paris (77 rue de Varenne), displayed in the garden of the Hôtel Biron. Other casts are at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), the Kunsthaus Zurich, the National Museum of Western Art (Tokyo), the Rodin Gallery (Seoul), and the California Legion of Honor (San Francisco). The Paris museum is the essential visit, housing the majority of Rodin's plasters, marbles, and bronzes.
Further Reading
Albert Elsen, Rodin's Gates of Hell (1985); Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (1993); Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Rodin (2014); J.A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, Rodin und Camille Claudel (1994); Jacques de Caso and Patricia B. Sanders, Rodin's Sculpture: A Critical Study (1977).