Imagination
This tumblr is an archive of inspiration. Works of art and literature, poetry, photography, quotes, etc. I also maintain another tumblr for science, and yet another for the occasional piece of personal writing.
> Contact. Cassandra McLean.
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Photo reblogged from I Never Knew Y☀u From The Sun
Rodin, Photographed by Edward Steichen
Love this, especially after my recent revival of Rodin appreciation.
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Auguste Rodin, The Kiss, marble
Rodin Museum, Paris, 1888-1889Like many of Rodin’s best-known individual sculptures, including The Thinker, the embracing couple depicted in the sculpture appeared originally as part of a group of reliefs decorating Rodin’s monumental bronze portal The Gates of Hell, commissioned for a planned museum of art in Paris. The couple were later removed from the Gates and replaced with another pair of lovers.
Originally titled Francesca da Rimini, as it depicts the 13th-century Italian noblewoman immortalised in Dante’s Inferno (Circle 2, Canto 5) who falls in love with her husband Giovanni Malatesta’s younger brother Paolo. Having fallen in love while reading the story of Lancelot and Guinevere, the couple are discovered and killed by Francesca’s husband. In the sculpture, the book can be seen in Paolo’s hand. The lovers lips do not actually touch in the sculpture to suggest that they were interrupted and met their demise without their lips ever having touched.
Its blend of eroticism and idealism makes it one of the great images of sexual love. The form of the lovers emerges from the highlights and shadows of the statue. Light and shade were used by Rodin to create an impression of actuality. He did with modeling that which his contemporaries, the French impressionist painters, were doing with pigment. Rodin indicated that his approach to sculpting women was of homage to them and their bodies, not just submitting to men but as full partners in ardor. The consequent eroticism in the sculpture made it controversial.
God. I love this. I love the toes, his hand, how tightly her arm wraps around his neck, the twisting of her body. Rodin, as mentioned above, indicates the female body as a “full partner in ardor,” not just submissive to man’s passion. And here she is extremely submissive: hanging on his neck, falling into him. Yet her passion is overwhelmingly more powerful because of this position of submission. Is this not what a woman’s love should be? A submissively dominant power?
