Pensador (Penseur) - Auguste Rodin

 

Pensador (Penseur) - Auguste Rodin
Coleção privada
Estátua

Now recognised as one of the most famous images in the history of western art, Rodin’s Penseur was first conceived as part of his monumental Gates of Hell. The figure was intended to represent Dante, surrounded by the characters of his Divine Comedy, but soon took on an independent life. ‘Thin and ascetic in his straight gown,’ Rodin wrote later, ‘my Dante would have been meaningless once divorced from the overall work. Guided by my initial inspiration, I conceived another "thinker", a nude, crouching on a rock, his feet tense. Fists tucked under his chin, he muses. Fertile thoughts grow slowly in his mind. He is no longer a dreamer. He is a creator’ (Rodin, quoted in Raphaël Masson & Véronique Mattiussi, Rodin, Paris, 2004, p. 38). Transcending Dante's narrative, Penseur became a universal symbol of reflection and creative genius.
Rodin envisaged Penseur to be the apex, both structurally and philosophically, of his Gates of Hell. As Camille Mauclair noted in 1898, ‘All the sculptural radiance ends in this ideal center. This prophetic statue can carry in itself the attributes of the author of the Divine Comedy, but it is still more completely the representation of Penseur. Freed of clothing that would have made it a slave to a fixed time, it is nothing more than the image of the reflection of man on things human. It is the perpetual dreamer who perceives the future in the facts of the past, without abstracting himself from the noisy life around him and in which he participates’ (C. Mauclair, ‘L'Art de M. Rodin’, in La Revue des Revues, 18th June 1898).
The larger size of this model was conceived in 1880-81, and was first exhibited in Copenhagen in 1888. The following year it was shown in Paris, with the original title Dante revised to read Le penseur: le poète. The figure was discussed by the artist shortly before his death, when he described his desire to personify the act of thinking: ‘Nature gives me my model, life and thought; the nostrils breathe, the heart beats, the lungs inhale, the being thinks and feels, has pains and joys, ambitions, passions, emotions... What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes’ (quoted in Saturday Night, Toronto, 1st December 1917).

Nota do blog: Modelo pequeno.