The Sculpture That Killed Its Creator...

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:03]What happens when the building a sculpture was made for is never built?

[00:00:09]When the artist keeps adding and removing figures for 37 years?

[00:00:14]And when the work is never cast in bronze during his lifetime?

[00:00:19]The result is the Gates of Hell.

[00:00:28]And nothing about it went the way anyone planned.

[00:00:38]Auguste Rodin received the commission in 1880.

[00:00:42]The French Directorate of Fine Arts wanted a monumental set of bronze doors for a planned Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris.

[00:00:49]The museum, of course, was never built.

[00:00:52]The ruins were demolished and a train station went up in their place.

[00:00:56]That train station was eventually converted into the Musée d'Orsay, which today displays Rodin's original plaster gates on the very site [music] where they were supposed to serve as a doorway. They finally arrived where they were always meant to go.

[00:01:10]But they have never functioned as doors.

[00:01:14]If you look at the earlier sketches, you can see Rodin working in a tradition he knew well.

[00:01:20]He had studied Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise at the Florence Baptistery, and his first drawings divide the doors into eight compartmentalized panels, each one illustrating a specific scene from Dante, orderly and legible.

[00:01:36]Ghiberti had spent 27 years on his doors and finished them.

[00:01:40]Rodin would spend 37 and never finish his.

[00:01:45]Within a few years, Rodin dissolved every border, every panel, every frame.

[00:01:52]The National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, which holds one of only seven bronze casts in existence, describes how he abandoned Dante's mythical order entirely, and the composition descended into a chaotic world without gravity, sequence, or readable narrative.

[00:02:09]Look at the top of the gates, and you will see three muscular figures leaning inward, their heads bowed, their left arms pointing down toward the abyss below.

[00:02:24]These are the three shades, souls of the damned who, in Dante's poem, stand at the entrance to hell and point toward the inscription, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

[00:02:46]But, here's a detail people miss entirely.

[00:02:51]The three figures are not three different sculptures.

[00:02:54]They are three identical casts of the same figure, a variation of Rodin's Adam, rotated into slightly different positions and assembled so that their arms converge at a single point.

[00:03:06]In the 1880s, this kind of mechanical repetition, using the same cast multiple times in a single composition, was radically unconventional.

[00:03:16]Rodin was not hiding the repetition.

[00:03:19]He was making it visible.

[00:03:21]Now, look lower, just above the door panels.

[00:03:25]There sits a figure you almost certainly recognize, though you may never have seen it in this context.

[00:03:33]The Thinker, originally called The Poet, was conceived as Dante himself surveying the damned souls below.

[00:03:40]On the gates, the figure is only about 70 cm tall, perched 6 m above ground level. It was foundry workers, not Rodin, who gave the sculpture its famous name. Most people who recognize The Thinker have never seen it in the place it was born.

[00:04:01]And then, there is the sculpture Rodin Expelled.

[00:04:05]Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, the adulterous lovers from the second circle of Dante's Inferno, originally appeared on the left door panel in an embrace so tender it became one of the most celebrated images in the history of sculpture. But, Rodin removed it in 1886.

[00:04:23]The joyful version went on to become the standalone masterpiece known as The Kiss. It became world-famous precisely because it was rejected.

[00:04:33]Because it was too happy for hell.

[00:04:37]At the bottom of the right-hand door jamb, nearly invisible, there is a crouched figure in low relief that art historians have identified as Rodin's self-portrait, which they call The Creator.

[00:04:50]>> [music] >> One hand supports the man's head, while the other holds a tiny feminine figure.

[00:05:00]If this identification is correct, then Rodin placed himself inside his own hell.

[00:05:06]Not as a character from Dante, but as the artist crouching beneath his own creation, holding the figure of a woman in his hand. That detail becomes more charged when you consider who actually shaped of what you see [music] on these doors.

[00:05:24]Camille Claudel joined Rodin's studio around 1884, and according to the Musée Rodin, she spent most of her time on the most difficult [music] anatomical elements, the hands and feet of figures for the gates.

[00:05:38]She was 19 years old.

[00:05:41]She would become Rodin's lover, his collaborator, and eventually his rival before their relationship disintegrated and her own career was overshadowed by his fame.

[00:05:54]In 1900, Rodin exhibited the Gates publicly for the first and only time during his life >> [music] >> at the Universal Exhibition in Paris.

[00:06:05]He had stripped away most of the protruding figures because he felt they created too strong a contrast with the background. The public largely ignored it.

[00:06:15]But Rodin never exhibited the Gates again.

[00:06:20]The question that has divided scholars ever since is whether the Gates were unfinished because Rodin could not finish them or because finishing them was never the point.

[00:06:33]Art historian Albert Elsen of Stanford, who wrote the definitive study of the Gates, argued that the perpetual revision was itself the artistic statement, that Rodin's strategies [music] of fragmentation, multiplication, and recombination represented a fundamental break from the Renaissance tradition of completed narrative sculpture.

[00:06:55]If you accept that reading, then the Gates [music] are not an unfinished commission.

[00:07:01]They are a finished argument that art does not have to stop.

[00:07:06]But if you see them as a sculptor's lifelong inability to commit, 37 years of adding, removing, never casting, [music] never delivering, then the Gates become something more melancholy.

[00:07:22]A door to a building that was never built, populated by figures that kept leaving, [music] made by a man who placed himself at the very bottom of his own creation and could not look away. [music] The first bronze cast was finally made between 1926 and 1928, nearly a decade after Rodin's death. It went to the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, >> [music] >> commissioned by an American collector who died two years before he could see it installed.

[00:07:54]Six more casts followed over the next 70 [music] years.

[00:07:58]Today, there are seven Gates of Hell in the world: >> [music] >> Paris, Philadelphia, Tokyo, Zurich, Stanford, Shizuoka, and Seoul.

[00:08:08]Three continents, seven doorways, [music] and none of them open onto anything.