Rodin at the Gates of Hell Author(s): Jacques de Caso Source: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 106, No.

731 (Feb., 1964), pp. 79-59 Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/874188 Accessed: 21/12/2009 05:17
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about 1685, when the ascendency of the classicizing viewpoint among Rome's major patrons and the continuing success of Carlo Maratti were just beginning to modify Baciccio's high baroque style. Both paintings are essentially secular in mood, created to decorate a room in some Roman palace where they would be prized for colour and movement more than for the theme. In the Golden Calf, the real subject is the jubilation of the idolators. The small figure of Moses in the distance seems almost an afterthought. But the composition, despite its emphatic symmetry, was apparently too crowded for the classicizing tastes of the age. For this reason, and for the sake of greater iconographic unity, when Baciccio painted his Thanksgiving Noah for the third time of he chose (or had chosen) as its pendant a Sacrifice Isaac.3 of
3

Both paintings come from the Kress Collection and are in Atlanta. For ill. see

fication of this statement. The Company Hall was not in existence before 1440 but was certainly erected by I475. This together with the difficult financial straits of the Company would make it highly improbable that they could have embarked on a rebuilding scheme in the thirties. The financial straits arose through the fact that after the Hall had been built they discovered that the land was not held in fee simple but fee farm and they were required to pay a sum of money to a descendant of the owner for him to purchase a Yorkshire manor. This makes the motives which led to the commissioning of the picture all the more impenetrable. As further evidence that the first Hall survived until the Great Fire we have constant references from 155I (when the Minutes begin) for periodic repairs to the structure. It is therefore possible to say with certainty that no major building programme took place at the time the Barber's picture was painted.
R. THEODORE BECK

w. SUIDA: Italian Paintings in Atlanta Art AssociationGalleries, Atlanta [1958],

pp.62 and 65. They are somewhat smaller than their Roman counterparts (163 by 132 cm.) and must be later because of their drier, duller colours.

The
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Literature

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Rodinat theGatesof Hell

BY JACQUES ALBERT DE CASO ELSEN'S book, Rodin's Gates ofHell,* a chapter of which had previously been published, is noteworthy in two respects. It is the first study concentrating on a single and capital work of an artist with whose production we feel a growing affinity; Rodin historians have not prepared us for such a detailed study. Moreover, the author presents his thesis in a way unknown to Rodin studies. He is not content merely with the results obtainable by pure historical investigations. Elsen realizes that a work of art remains as fruitful as it was originally intended to be, only when the facts are enriched by meditation and criticism. Such a programme is ambitious: if fulfilled, little remains to be said. In his Preface, Elsen defines the limits he has set himself. Acknowledging the provisional character of his work, he points out the difficulties which Rodin historians must face. One cannot judge his book without being aware of them. The available information on Rodin consists of an immense body of literature, practically all published during the lifetime of the sculptor. Everything is to be found there: innumerable criticisms, interviews, and biographies, recollections of ephemeral secretaries and students of two continents, apologia by admirers of both sexes. Few are worthy of attention. Inaccuracies and contradictions make for uncertainty about facts and dates. The artist's death engendered a partial eclipse in the taste for his art. Paradoxically, this was accompanied by the periodical republication of many works from the early literature and by the fashion for picture-books which continues unabated to our day. The illustrations are repeated from one book to another and have at last emasculated the total work. Like all other historians of Rodin, Elsen has only this material to work with. The study of source material was closed to him and he explains why. Rodin, before his death, bequeathed to France the whole of his production and possessions.This legacy, assembled in his town house at the Hotel de Biron and at his villa-studio in Meudon, comprises the complete body of his projects, models, sketches, variants, drawings, sketchbooks, and art collections. To this have to be added his library, private papers, and correspondence. The cataloguing is still in progress and little of it has been published.1

The HolbeinBarber-Surgeons Group

Dr Roy C. Strong in his enthralling Preliminary Report on the rediscovery of Holbein's Cartoon for the Barber-Surgeons Group in your January 963 issue provides the final answer to the mass of conflicting evidence which had collected around each version of this group composition. That the painting in the possession of the Barber-SurgeonsCompany had suffered severely in the Great Fire is referred to not only by Pepys, but in the Minute books of the Company where mention is made of the touching up of the picture as a result of this calamity. The reason this large picture survived at all is doubtless due to the fact that the Hall of the Company being contiguous with Cripplegate churchyard would enable this painting to be transferred there for its safety or the proximity of the Hall to Cripplegate itself would alternatively enable the picture to be carried into Moorfields. I had always believed that the cartouche with its lengthy inscription was a post-Fire touching up to make good a large area of damaged surface but Dr Strong proves this theory untenable as the outline of the cartouche is clearly shown in the Cartoon. Dr George Graham, Master of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons has kindly drawn my attention to the evidence from the X-rays taken by the Courtauld Institute which reveal that the figures of Dr Butts and the apothecary must have been completely destroyed because the gesso has gone. Butts must have been repainted which explains the difference in his mouth from that of the Holbein in Boston. At the end of his report Dr Strong deals with the inscription on the cartouche and states 'the word domum can only refer in this context to some sort of building ... although ... it carries within it an implied allusion to all those people and things connected with it'. In this I would agree that the word domum used in a is corporate sense, just as Christ Church Oxford and the House are one and the same and allude to a particular corporate group, but always a corporate group who have a building. The difficulty in the case of the use of dornum the eulogy of the Barber-Surgeons in is that there is no known instance of this use in the corGroup porate sense for a city company. Dr Strong adds that 'there is nothing to disprove the hypothesis that the Hall was rebuilt during the thirties and finished finally in I541 when Vicary held the mastership of the Company'. I am now able, as a result of recent research, to suggest a modiSIR,

* Rodin's'Gatesof Hell'. By Albert E. Elsen. xi+ I6o pp. (I03 pi.). Minneapolis (University of Minnesota Press), London (Oxford University Press), 3J3. 1 Corpus Vasorum France. Fascicule i6, Musee National Rodin, Paris Antiquorum. [1945].

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The only listing of the sculptures (very incomplete) is the Grappe catalogue, which was prudently described by its author as an This 'essai de classement chronologique'. catalogue itself is based on the earlier literature and has been but slightly brought up to date since 1927. Therefore any researchinto a specific work is threatened by its inaccuracies and lapses. Moreover, Rodin's papers and correspondence must remain unpublished until 1967, by which time French law will no longer 'protect' persons therein mentioned. Finally it is difficult to gain access to many works, particularly the uncatalogued models, projects, and drawings. Infrequently some selections of these works are arranged for temporary exhibition.2 In short, researchersare entirely dependent on the courtesy of the administration of the Musee Rodin. While working conditions at the Mastbaum Foundation in Philadelphia are of another order entirely, the number of works there is limited and it is largely without source material. An inventory of Rodin's works in private collections also remains to be written. The foregoing reasons somewhat explain the lack of enthusiasm felt by potential Rodin historians and they attest to the courage of Elsen's undertaking. The first chapter of Elsen's book sketches in the general development of French sculpture from I850 onwards and shows in which directions the slow-starting Rodin broke free of this trend. Elsen rightly underlines one of the dominant patterns of these years: the progressive freezing-up of neo-antique aesthetic as defined early in the century, codified by the Academie, taught for better or worse in the 1.cole, maintained in the public's taste by the Salons, and at length contaminated by a growing 'modernity'. Rodin was to ignore these manifestations which display a degraded imagery and a paucity of formal invention; from an early age he turned away from this conformist sculpture, in the direction of a different milieuto which he owed his first formation. Elsen does not sufficiently demonstrate that, from 1850 on, a new movement sharply diverged from the centres of rigid academism and dominated the scene. This new attitude set the tone for Rodin's first years. It was directly tied to the tradition of 'realism', or one may say, of the 'baroque', which was kept alive by the independents and those who were refused by the Salons in mid-century: Barye, Clesinger, Etex, Preault. Among the young artists one figure particularly dominatedCarpeaux, from whom Rodin was to receive his training around Thus, in considering the I870's, Elsen groups together under the label 'academicians' the figures whom he sees as the 'leading sculptors' of the day: 'Guillaume, Dubois, Mercie, Chapu, Dalou, Delaplanche, Barrias, Falguiere, Carpeaux, Crauck and Schonewerk'. In such small details Elsen commits minor inaccuracies which reflect a widespread misconception of the period's tendencies.4 For to group Carpeaux with the academicians is as little true today as it was in I860. If Carpeaux's work itself were not proof enough of this, then its critical reception would attest to it. His whole career developed on the margin of, or better still despite, this milieu,and foreshadowed that of Rodin. In contradistinction to Rodin, Carpeaux did receive the Prix de Rome, although neither was called upon to teach at the lRcole or was elected to the Academie. Carpeaux's success under the Second
'Rodin Inconnu, Musee du Louvre', Paris, December I962January I963. 2 3 L. CLEMENT-CARPEAUX: La veritesur l'ouvreet la vie de J. B. Carpeaux, vols., Paris [I934-5], i, ch.I. 4 Dalou, in London from 1871 to 1880, cannot be attached to the developments in the French milieux during these years. The 'personification' of Science by Carpeaux is in reality one of the two figures intended for the extrados of the pediment destined for the decoration of the Pavillon de Flore of the Palais du et dansle monde protegeant l'agriculture Louvre, La FranceImpirialeportantla lumi?re et les sciences.One accepts this with difficulty as an example 'typical of the declamatory sculpture in the Salons'. The model for the pediment was exhibited at the Salon of I866 and not of I879.
2 Recently,

I855.3

Empire was due, like that of Rodin under the Republic, to the receipt of impressive commissions. And these depended, in both cases, on individual patronage which was fundamentally opposed to the system of selection by competition demanded by the Academie. The commission for the Gatesdemonstratesthis well. Whatever the political complexion of the Comite des Beaux-Artsmay have been, whether liberal or conservative, the commission itself was granted owing to the intervention of a powerful political figure. Edmond Turquet, right-hand man of Jules Ferry, was at the source from which flowed the most anti-clerical decisions of the Third Republic. Rodin accepted the commission for the Gates a few days after the Government had decided to expel the Jesuits from France. Elsen is more at ease when he leaves the study of the period to focus on Rodin. What he says of importance about the years 1875-80 when Rodin was painfully discovering Michelangelo and - without so much heart-searching- Gothic art, has already been said; but he says it better. As has been repeatedly observed, The Age of Bronzeis at once a break with the sculptor's past and with the art of his day. Its history still remains to be written, although Elsen treats it with a sensitivity to formal analysis which is his book's major virtue. The Age of Bronze is the manifesto of an 'existential' conception of sculpture. In it Rodin burned away the last traces of what Elsen rightly calls an 'initially clever but mediocre talent'. Henceforth Rodin conceives sculptural form as 'the expressivenessof structure, movement, modelling' as worthy 'devices to convey important meanings'. In addition to the art of the past which strengthened his style, Rodin meditated long on poetry which led him to transformhis art into visual poetry. Like Rilke, Cladel, and others, Elsen stressesthe importance of Dante and Baudelaire for Rodin who studied their decisive texts prior to the commission of the Gates,although the reason for the remains unexplained. As far as is selection of the Divine Comedy possible, Elsen tries to avoid the discredited method by which the style of works in the plastic arts is explained by analogies and 'correspondences'that the critic sets up between work and text. Elsen is forced to rely on limited source material - fifteen or so drawings based on Dante taken from the Goupil album and some drawings from the one copy of Les Fleursdu Mal made for Gallimard - with the help of which he describes the circumstancesof these relationships and the way in which the texts are suggestive of images and help define a specific plastic vision. is The choice of the Inferno not surprisingin nineteenth-century French art which was more conscious of Dante than Elsen will allow.5 This awareness, as clearly marked in other artists as in Rodin, does not reflect a deep understanding of the religious problems of the period, nor of the chequered fortunesof the Catholic church. It simply provided the pessimismof the romantics with a perfect decoy, a dramatic and imaginative epic of human destiny. One is aware of the effect it had on Rodin. In I889, nine years after the commission, the Goncourts, contemptuous of autod'ouvrier illetre,devient didacts, noted that 'le Dante, dansson cerveau itroiteet bete'.6 unereligion Few precise literary references can be traced in the drawings made prior to and contemporary with the Gates.What references there are, were to be abandoned during the course of work. The picturesque, the anecdotal, the settings and ensembles sought out by the romantics were eschewed in favour of a strong image, reduced to human proportions, particularly when the texts describe the greatest physical trials coupled with the greatest moral
5 A. COUNSON: Dante en France,Paris [I906]; I. DE VASCONCELLES: L'inspiration Paris [I925]. dans dantesque I'artromantiquefranfais, 6 E. AND J. DE GONCOURT: 22 Journal, Mimoiresde la vie littdraire, vols., Monaco

[1956-8],

xvi,

p.62 (Thursday,

I8th April 1889.)

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torment. Rodin translates them into isolated figures or groups in which the nude body alone expresses, through its gesture, movement, changes in its anatomy, and in its substance, the tragic nature of human experience. Certainly the reading of Baudelaire intensified Rodin's dantisme far as passion and eroticism are concerned. But who as tres else? What do we know, for example, of 'la lecture libreavecde tenaces ?7 .. vivants' Elsen's preferences . pourFlaubertet pour quelques lengthy analysis of the illustrations of the FleursduMal are perhaps more relevant to the history of Rodin's spiritual progress than they are to an understanding of the themes and forms of the Gates. These illustrations are late; Rodin was at work on them in I887.8 One should neither relate them to the drawings for Dante nor see in any of them a 'prophetic prelude to the actual undertaking of the door'. Rather, one should see them as inspired by the Gates. Two chapters (III and V) are concerned with an archaeological study of the Gates. A few documents drawn from the Archives Nationales, which Elsen should have quoted in their original text, shed little light. One cannot easily relate them to a step-by-step development of the Gates. The sources which Elsen uses to reconstruct a chronological development for the work remain a half-dozen undated drawings and clay-models long familiar to Rodin historians. None the less he brings two previously unpublished drawings to light. One of them (his Fig.g) confirms for Elsen the often alleged suggestion of the inspiration drawn from Ghiberti's doors for the Baptistry of Florence. This drawing shows clearly that Rodin's first efforts were directed towards making an architectonic composition which he developed in a series of drawings. These drawings restrict the sculptural element to historiated panels within a flat, legible, and symmetrical composition; but one cannot identify the scenes depicted. Cladel, who saw and heard a great deal concerning Rodin, hints at an earlier scheme based on 'un du portailgothique XVemesiecle',9but to which no known work can be related. The beginnings of the Gatesremain unclear and links are missing. A letter of Rodin dated i88I, the translation of which is given very imperfectly compared with the original text that Elsen cited in his article of 1952, alludes to a plan that Rodin had of flanking the Gateswith monumental figures. Is this a memory of Milton ?10An unpublished drawing (his pl.42) indicates them, but the iconography of these isolated figures remains problematic. Ought one to follow Elsen in his identification of an Eve which would be used at the same time as a crowning and a mullion (his pl.33) ? Elsen notes the eclecticism of such an architectural setting, pointing to sources in Gothic and Renaissance art. The parallel he draws with the LastJudgement the fagade of the Cathedral on of Orvieto is convincing. The same is true for relationships between some preparatory drawings and Italianizing tombs of the sixteenth century. Let us note that when in Paris Rodin could somehow recall the Ghiberti Baptistry doors while looking at the bronze doors which Triqueti made for the church of the Madeleine. Here, as distinguished from Ghiberti but in accord with the drawings of Rodin, there are eight historical reliefs of biblical subjects surmounted by a rectangular tympanum, which Ghiberti's lacks, and stabilized by a centrally placed figure. From the very beginning this strongly marked architectonic arrangement avoided what Elsen clearly sees as the 'clash of his developing sculptural conceptions with the constraining form of architecture'. This struggle was to result in the abandonment of
sa CLADEL: Rodin, sa vie glorieuse, vie inconnue, ddition definitive, Paris [I950], p. 140. 10 ParadiseLost, u, 648-9.
7 G. GEFFROY: La Vie Artistique, Deuxieme Serie, Paris [I893], p. I 3. 8 op. GONCOURT, cit., xv, pp.6o-i (Thursday, 29th December 1887).

compartmented reliefs for the free play of sculpture across the whole surface of the door. The difficulty of applying a method which aims at the evolutionary study of themes and styles to a work whose chronology defies precise examination leads Elsen into a certain repetitiveness. Two long chapters (IV and VI) develop the central issues. One of them goes beyond a study of the procedure employed to give a brilliant account of Rodin at work. The way in which Rodin controls the chaos of an inferno whose nature is the human form is treated with remarkable insight; Rodin's invention and execution play havoc with accepted notions. In his composition, equal value is given to the details and to the ensemble; the incidental takes on a new authority; the visual impact is enhanced by the disconcerting play of elements of different scale. An anatomy which draws its laws from corporeal and spiritual suffering leads to a deliberate alteration in conventional distortion. This anatomy thrives on the interplay of detail with ensemble, the free re-manipulation of elements. Its expressive power is increased by the invention of new visual and psychological categories: the fragmented, the unformed, the unfinished, the yearned-for. In his denial of traditional verisimilitude to volumes and surfaces, the artist establishes an ambiguous vision. The spectator is conscious of a disordered relief of turbulent humanity imposed on the work by the capriciousness of light or by his own
empathic experience.

Elsen wishes to imply many things when he speaks of the 'meaning' of the Gates. Fundamentally, separated from the 'letter' of the Divine Comedy, work becomes through the years the a pretext for an endless creative adventure which allows the artist to build his vision of a modern inferno wherein the tragic isolation of mankind prevails. This inferno of anonymous figures ends by crystallizing into a more vivid image than ever of two episodes of Dante. The drawings and the most elaborate model we have for the Gatesdemonstrate to what degree they fascinated Rodin. Their success in French nineteenth-century art is greater than Frances Yates
suggests.11

The story of Francesca became the symbol of passion - tragic, innocent, and punished; that of Ugolino, in whom De Sanctis saw 'the most eloquent and modern character of the Divine Comedy',12became the symbol of the witness of the punishment of innocence and the picture of a monstrous paternity. Elsen has justly noticed the attraction that this last theme held for Rodin as both foreground and background of the genesis of the Gates.More than just an element of Rodin's dantisme, we not see here the can link which binds together the Gatesto what he was reading before I88o, perhaps even the reason for the artist's interest in Dante? Elsen does note that 'before I880, Rodin did a small sculpture of Ugolino and his dying sons'. Rodin's two most trustworthy biographers, Cladel and Lawton, agree on the date of I875 for this work, and Lawton adds that it was done in Rome, from where Rodin could have brought back a 'small size model of Ugolino which may be considered as the virtual commencement of the Porte de l'Enfer'.l3 The richness of dress in which Rodin was to wrap this theme - in the form of drawings, in groups, in the Gatesthemselves - can hardly be understood without reference to the Ugolinoby Carpeaux which was thesculpture of the I86o's. Elsen takes account of the differences in style, but he tends to underestimate the possible influence on Rodin of a famous antecedent by the only artist of his time that he admired 'avecenThe thousiasme'.14 hesitation that Rodin shows in the selection for
11F. A. YATES: 'Transformations of Dante's and Ugolino',Journal of the Warburg Courtauld Institutes,I4 [1951], pp.92- I 7. 12 'L'Ugolino di Dante', Nuovi Saggi Critici,5th edn., Naples [1892], p.5513 F. LAWTON: The life and workof AugusteRodin,New York [1907], p.I I2. 14Rodin to Bourdelle, quoted by E. CAMPAGNAC: 'Rodin et Bourdelle d'apres des lettres inedites', La Grande Revue,131 [1929], p.I I.

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Ugolino's pose, seen simultaneously as seated (Goupil drawings, last model for the Gates)and on all-fours, has an antecedent in the work of Carpeaux.15Moreover, Rodin could scarcely have been unaware of the fascination that Dante held for Carpeaux, nor of the long genesis of Carpeaux's work in Rome: Mantz, in 1875, and Chesneau, the year of the commission, in the first important monograph devoted to Carpeaux, both dwell on its lengthy development.16 This image of sustained suffering was to take tenacious hold on Rodin: during the great exhibition of 1900 the artist was to show an 'esquisse etuded'une pour un Ugolin. Robuste en d'homme assis, unpeupenchee avant;pourunUgolin quin'apas figure eteexecute.'17 degree to which the representation of Ugolino The seen as a seated figure - overlaps that of the Penseur evident is soon after I880, to judge from the most elaborate model (Elsen, pl.43). The figure of the Penseur of course the embodiment of the is meditative world of the Gates.Elsen stresses its value as a strong, hieratic, universal image and the plastic importance it takes in the composition: while echoing the monumental figures of tympana and pediments it greets the spectator at the threshold of the edifice. Elsen rightly relates the meditative pose to tradiwhose 'models' date back to tional representations of Melancholia before Michelangelo.18He holds to the autobiographical meaning contained in an image which separates the spiritual existence of the artist from his active and passionate life. However, it is surprising to see Elsen, usually so perceptive in his formal analysis, accepting a little-known wax model (his pl.6o and 6 i) as a sketch for the Penseur. The sitter could have been the same in both cases but nothing in it proclaims the closely knit composition of the Penseur,which was conceived from the very first in its position in situ. Without a doubt one must separate this work from the genesis of the Gates. Confronted with the final work, Rodin's Inferno summarizes the descent of the artist into himself, a descent outside of time, a descent whose modern and personal meaning is illuminated and better revealed to us when its path is considered in the light of Baudelaire. Elsen, although employing freely a great number of analogies which seemingly furnish argument enough for a reconstitution of Rodin's spiritual adventure, none the less tends to restrict the origin of Rodin's sources; Baudelaire is surrounded by a fundamentally pessimistic climate which impregnated the of 'poesie philosophique' the century. This attitude, nourished by Christian or para-Christian thought, is at home in the vocabulary of vision and of the epic: it sets forth the great theme upon which Baudelaire and Rodin, doubtless more than others, reflected - the situation of man in his original and irresolvable conflicts between good and evil, pure and impure, finite and infinite.19 Finally does not an over-solicitousnessfor literary sources risk becoming too exclusive a method ? For example, the figure of the Vieille Femme,taken from the Gates,which Rodin described under a multitude of titles, certainly evokes Villon, Ronsard, and Baudelaire; but does it not also evoke Donatello? Could not Rodin have known the Renaissance bronze statuette, so marked was the vogue for such work in Rodin's time, which also helped popularize the image of the aged woman, seated and decrepit ?20 Elsen has not overlooked a capital point: the absorption into the final Gatesof the original formula wherein a flat system pre15 et Gneiraldes dessinsdu Musee du Louvre J. GUIFFREY and P. MARCEL: Inventaire de du Muse'e Versailles,AcoleFranfaise,3, Paris [I909], No.2033. 16 p. MANTZ: 'Carpeaux', Gazette des Beaux-Arts[ISt May 1876], pp.593-63I; Paris [ 880], pp.69-83. sa E. CHESNEAU: Le statuaire B. Carpeaux, vie et sonaeuvre, 3. 17 'Exposition de I900. L'CEuvre de Rodin . .', Paris, Societe d'edition artistique, 900, No. Ioo. 18 A. CHASTEL: 'Melancholia in the sonnets of Lorenzo de' Medici', Journal of and the Warburg Courtauld vmII[1945], pp.61-7. Institutes, 19j. HUNT:The Epic in Nineteenth-century France,Oxford [1941], ch.VII-X. 20 L. PLANISCIG: Andrea Riccio,Vienna [1927], Illus. 79, 80, and 8I.

vailed to which a third dimension was effectively added. A visual conflict is maintained in the Gates between a respect for the architectonic frameworkand the central undefined space wherein the forms seem to dissolve. The frameworkitself is constantly reconstructed or altered according to variations in the mouldings which Rodin conceived of anthropomorphically and within which there is no 'solutionde continuite'21 he has observed in as Gothic art. In the last analysis the Gatesremains an illusionistic monument; striving like an architectural edifice to conjure up a real depth; altering according to the pace with which the spectator moves about it. Here resides Rodin's fundamental equation of sculpture with architecture which he later developed in his writings on Gothic art. Elsen might have explored these ideas more profitably had he treated more thoroughly Rodin's re-affirmation of this attitude in the Tourdu Travail:a work whose history Elsen inaccurately reports22and which he relates solely to Rodin's socialist preoccupations. Certainly he is right in seeing it as an epilogue to the Gatesand as a project for a 'modern version of the building of a gothic cathedral'. The Tourwas intended to be a immense plastic poem glorifying not only those who labour with their hands but those who labour with their minds, as well as the symbol of the ascension of man from brute matter to pure spirit. In passing it may be added that Rodin may have considered The using the Gatesas an entrance-way to the Tourdu Travail.23 architectural formula of the Tour develops that of an empathic interior space which had been already suggested in the Gatesand which curiously anticipated Wright's Guggenheim Museum. Its principle is that of a tower-museum in which the spectator takes a long journey in space and time. The monument carries him along a one-way spiral staircase, open on the outside, and accompanies him on the interior core with an uninterrupted frieze relief. In the case of both the Gatesand the Tourthe aim of the work of art is to engulf and consume the spectator. Throughout his work Elsen is to be praised for liberating the Gatesfrom facile interpretations which simply restrict themselves to explaining its forms and meanings by comparisons with moments in the history of styles or of ideas. He elects to stay with the work and to recover it with a patient and creative analysis based on the precision of his description. The material Elsen uses, his chronology and sources, do not push the evidence much further than was attempted in the earlier literature, on which the author has been forced to rely. The book tends in the direction of an essay which, not forgetting the admirable text by Rilke, throws light on a work of rich and nebulous genesis, and beyond this, on Rodin himself. Elsen's book will be ranked among the very small number of fundamental Rodin studies. The illustrations are excellent. Unfortunately the text suffers from typographical errors which affect names and dates. The bibliography, while extensive, is diffuse, and neglects older studies concerned with Rodin which are still instructive, and recent research, disappointing though it is, on the Gates.24 Despite an apparently simple plan, the book makes slow reading, with its accumulation of a wealth of incisive observationsin the text and footnotes which are always sensitive if not always convincing. A second reading smooths over the burrs of historical method and excessive interpretation.
21 et Rodin,I'homme l'suvre,Bruxelles [I908], p. 143. j. CLADEL:Auguste 22 The idea for a Monument au Travail does not belong to Jules Desbois

but to Dalou who was secretly at work at this theme after 1889, Carnetsde Dalou Paris [1903], pp.248-9. Armand Dalou,sa vieet son euvre, quoted by M. DREYFOUS: Dayot tried, but only after 1900, to instigate an international subscription for the monument which failed. 23 R. CANUDO: 'La Torre del lavoro e della volonta di Augusto Rodin', Vita d'Arte,I, [1908], pp. I55-71. 24 w. BOEK: 'Rodins Hollenpforte und ihre kunstgeschichtliche Bedeutung', xvi [1954], pp. I61-96. Jahrbuch, Wallraf-Richartz

82

and 8. 7ephyr Flora by La Fosse. Three crayons,

des Dessins, Musee du Louvre.)

26-I

by

2I-6

cm. (Cabinet

and 9. Zephyr Flora,by La Fosse. Ihree crayons, 2fS by Dessins, Musee du Louvre.)

2I-6

cm. (Cabinet des

I 0.

Study for Spring,by Antoine Watteau. Three crayons, 32 by 27 cm. (Cabinet des Dessins, Musee du Louvre.)

I I.

Engraving by Pietro Parboni Landscape. plan, Fig.A).

(I8IO)

after the Grimaldi fresco (see I 5 on the