Eternal Idol

Rodin modeled more than two hundred figures inspired by Dante’s Inferno for his massive sculptural project that came to be known as the Gates of Hell (1880–c. 1890). This celebrated figural group, derived from that work, was carved for the painter Eugène Carrière, who reluctantly lent it to the watershed 1900 Rodin retrospective exhibition. There it was so enthusiastically received that Rodin produced a second marble of the figures. The title is puzzling. Women were often described as “idols” in nineteenth-century poetry; the woman here may be only an ideal, in spite of her cool, fleshly presence. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote: “a mysterious greatness emanates from this group. . . . One doesn’t dare assign a meaning to it. . . . A heaven is near, but is not yet attained; a hell is near, and not yet forgotten.”