ITP 43: The Kiss, by Auguste Rodin

Date: 11-02-2001
Owning Institution: Tate Modern
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     20th Century    

Three days before Valentine’s Day, this week’s work of art is Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss. The passionately embracing couple appeared in their earliest incarnation as just one small element in the artist’s first significant commission, for a massive bronze doorway decorated with relief sculpture illustrating Dante’s Inferno, known as “The Gates of Hell”. Placed in the centre of the left-hand door panel, next to the figure of a woman with a child sitting on her lap, they seem to have been meant to symbolise sexual as opposed to maternal love. The composition stuck in the sculptor’s memory and he eventually decided to treat the theme on a monumental scale.

The Kiss illustrates a moment in the lives of a young man and woman whose tragic story was recounted in the Inferno. While visiting the second circle of Hell, dwelling place of those who had committed sins of the flesh, Dante encountered the shades of Paolo and Francesca, two ill-starred lovers famous in medieval Italy for the strength of their passion and the bloodiness of their death. Francesca, the daughter of Guida da Polenta, had married Gianciotto Malatesta, Lord of Rimini, in 1275. Her husband had entrusted her to the care of his handsome brother, Paolo, and they had fallen in love while reading the romances of the courtly love tradition. In Dante’s version of the story, they were first stirred to physical passion by the account in the Arthurian Legend of Lancelot’s first embrace of Queen Guinevere - one illicit affair engendering another. But Paolo and Francesca enjoyed the fruits of their forbidden love for a rather shorter time than Lancelot and Guinevere. No sooner had they kissed than Francesca’s husband Giancotto sprang from behind the arras and stabbed them both to death. “Love has led us to a unique end,” they tell Dante in hell.

In the larger-than-life marble version reproduced here, Rodin indicates that he has indeed represented the fateful moment described in the Inferno by having a book - doubtless the provocative Arthurian romance - slip from Paolo’s limp hand. The unseen presence of the vengeful Gianciotto Malatesta is implicit in the scene. So The Kiss is prelude to a killing: a Valentine’s Day massacre, of a kind.

Rodin was by no means the only nineteenth-century artist to have illustrated this particular legend, which became something of a stock subject during the Romantic period thanks to its heady combination of forbidden passion and tragic death. The couple’s nudity also conjures up the image of Adam and Eve, making the woman a temptress and the man her hapless accomplice in sin - and this too may have been part of the meaning of The Kiss. Prone throughout his life to sudden, passionate infatuations, Rodin seems often to have thought of sexual attraction as a kind of curse - a tin can tied to the tail of a dog, in Yeats’s memorable formulation - and to have regarded women as dangerous femmes fatales. Another of his works, entitled The All-Devouring Female, shows a woman attacking a man as if she were a tigress, and although there is little sense of violence in The Kiss there is perhaps an undertone of compulsion. The man, whose hands and arms are limp, seems acted upon rather than acting. All the energy and urgency comes from the woman’s side.

But Rodin seems to have intended his embracing lovers to symbolise the aspirations of the spirit, as well as the desires of the flesh - at least if Paul Gsell is to be believed. Gsell, who interviewed Rodin extensively in the sculptor’s later years, put his own interpretation of The Kiss to its creator:

“I said ‘It seems to me that what has preoccupied you above all in the human being is the strange discomfort of the soul bound inside the body; in all your statues it is the same leap of the spirit towards the dream, in spite of the weightiness and cowardliness of the flesh… In your Thinker, meditation, which strives in vain to embrace the absolute, contracts the athletic body under its terrible effort, bends it, curls it up, crushes it. Even in your Kiss, the bodies quiver anxiously as if they feel in advance the impossibility of realising the indissoluble union desired by their souls… Is all this right, master?’

‘I will not say no,’ said Rodin, who pensively caressed his long beard… ‘in observing my works, you have correctly put your finger on the leap of the soul towards the the perhaps chimerical realm of truth and of boundless liberty. There lies, indeed, the mystery that moves me…’”

This may explain why, for all the eroticism of its subject, the style in which The Kiss has been executed seems somewhat distant from reality. The sculpture was carved by a studio assistant named Rigaud under the supervision of Rodin - who disliked stonecutting and whose own truest gift was for modelling - and it was done in such a way as to minimise attention on surface detail and focus it, rather, on the group as a whole. The surfaces of the two carved bodies are rough and in many places seem deliberately half-finished, as if what Rodin was after was the sculptural equivalent of a blurred image. He greatly admired Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures, especially the so-called Slaves in the Louvre. Rodin may also have been familiar with the Neoplatonic Renaissance conceit according to which such half-sculpted bodies, seemingly struggling to free themselves from roughened blocks of stone, were likened to the human soul as it aspires towards God.

The Tate’s version of The Kiss was the second large marble version of the group created in Rodin’s studio. Its differs from the original, in the Musee Rodin in Paris, in one significant respect.