Chartres

French artist Rodin was born on December 12, 1840, in Paris, and died in 1917. Gifted with a natural talent for the perception of forms, he was never, however, admitted to the School of Fine Arts. The clay head Man with a Broken Nose It was rejected by the Salon of 1864. He became a student and assistant of Carrier-Belleuse, executing some of the commissions he received. The discovery of the work of Michelangelo Buonarroti, on a trip to Italy in 1874, liberated his style and made him integrate the importance of modeling. The controversy generated at the Salon of 1877 by Bronze Age This eventually earned him official protection. He thus received several commissions, including the design of... The Gates of Hell, the monument The Burghers of Calais and the statue of Honoré de Balzac. His reputation continued to grow, exhibiting at the Paris Salon, the Brussels Exhibition, and the Universal Exhibition of 1900. Rodin broke surfaces to create new lighting effects, leaving parts unfinished, expressing the idea of ​​the statue sprouting from the stone. His passion for Camille Claudel, his collaborator and sister of the writer Paul Claudel, inspired his various versions of The Kiss and other works with erotic themes. Rodin's last phase is linked to the Symbolist movement and includes a series of hands and allegorical female figures.