The Gates of Hell
Auguste Rodin (1840 to 1917) · Modelled 1880 to 1917, cast later
Towering over the entrance hall is a pair of bronze doors six metres high, swarming with almost two hundred figures who fall, cling, twist and grieve across every surface. This is Rodin's Gates of Hell, the project that consumed him for the last thirty seven years of his life and was never finished in his lifetime. It was commissioned in 1880 by the French state as the entrance to a new museum of decorative arts that was never built, and Rodin took his subject from Dante's Inferno, the poem in which the living poet is led through the circles of the damned. The Museo Soumaya cast is one of only a handful in the world.
Look at the top first. Above the doors sit the Three Shades, three identical figures who point downward, and beneath them, in the tympanum, sits The Thinker, brooding over the whole scene. Then let your eye travel down the panels. Here are Paolo and Francesca, the adulterous lovers swept along by the wind; Ugolino crawling over the bodies of his children; and dozens of anonymous figures who seem to be melting out of the bronze or being dragged back into it. Rodin worked on the gates in sections, and many of his most famous sculptures, The Kiss among them, began life as small figures here. The surface is deliberately unresolved, with lumps of bronze and unfinished edges, because for Rodin the process was the meaning.
The gates were first cast in bronze in the 1920s after Rodin's death, using the plaster he left behind, and later casts were made under the authority of the Musée Rodin. The Soumaya version stands in the vestibule where visitors see it on arrival and again on departure, and it sets the tone for the Rodin collection upstairs. It matters as the central work of the founder of modern sculpture, a single object that contains most of his ideas. The memorable detail is the crouching woman at the lower left, whose body seems to be sinking into the door itself.
Did You Know? Many of Rodin's most famous sculptures, including The Thinker and The Kiss, started as small figures on these doors.
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