RODIN AND THE ART OF ANCIENT GREECE

Accompanying the British Museum's exhibition on "Rodin and the Parthenon", this important book on the inspiration behind one of the 20th century's greatest sculptors is a visual revelation. Rodin made many sketches of the Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum, known as the Elgin Marbles, and also worked from plaster casts in the Louvre. He even had his own small-scale cast of the Parthenon friezes among a huge collection of antique sculpture. In 1889 "The Gates of Hell" was commissioned, a year before Rodin first visited London, and his constant remodelling of the monumental sculpture proceeded in parallel with the influence of the Parthenon on his work. Rodin's art was compared by his contemporaries to the work of the great Greek sculptor Pheidias, and he believed that coloured marble reproduced the human body more vividly than bronze. His drawings of the Parthenon friezes are meticulously accurate, conveying the same expressiveness in shallow relief that he himself achieved in pieces such as "The Earth and the Moon", where the figures are half-emerging from the rock itself, or the 1895 sculpture "Thought", where a pensive female head seems to spring from a block of marble. Figures in the Parthenon friezes also inspired his free-standing sculpture, for instance "The Age of Bronze", which he was wrongly accused of having cast from life, and "The Martyr" which is influenced by the Parthenon's incomparable metope "Death of a Lapith". Famous works such as "The Kiss" and "The Thinker" show a classical monumentality coupled with a modern sensibility. Falling was a theme of Rodin's later years and his torso of a Falling Man owes something to the Parthenon, something to Michelangelo's slaves struggling free of their marble blocks. Rodin is a sculptor of motion and emotion and he learned his expressiveness from ancient Greece, imparting a modern consciousness to his exploration of mythological themes. 25.5 x 28.5cm, 240pp, chronology, over 200 superb reproductions, mainly in mono and sepia.
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