Rodin was born in 1840 into a working-class family in Paris. His father worked as a police officer. As a young man, Rodin studied drawing and eventually got into art school, though he struggled to get accepted into the more prestigious École des Beaux-Arts.
He spent much of his life with a woman named Rose Beuret. They lived together for decades but didn’t marry until shortly before her death in 1917. During that time, he also had a long relationship with another sculptor, Camille Claudel, which lasted around ten to fifteen years. Their relationship was intense and complicated, and she had a major influence on his work.
Rodin started his career in 1864, working in the studio of a sculptor named Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. He submitted works to the Salon, the official art exhibition of the French Academy, but many of his early pieces were rejected. Still, he kept at it and continued developing his style.
In 1875, when he was thirty-five, Rodin traveled to Italy. That trip was important for him. He studied works by Michelangelo and ancient Roman sculptures, and it had a strong effect on how he thought about form and the human body. You can see this influence in his later work, especially in how he handled muscle, movement, and dramatic poses.
Rodin’s work was also shaped by the ideas floating around in 19th-century France. A lot of artists and writers were looking back to earlier figures like Dante, whose Divine Comedy inspired some of Rodin’s most famous work, and to Renaissance artists like Michelangelo. Fragments of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures were also big sources of inspiration at the time.
One artist who had a noticeable impact on Rodin, even though he wasn’t his teacher, was Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. Carpeaux worked in a more expressive style and paid close attention to emotion and motion in his figures. His approach was part of a wider trend in French art and literature during the late 1700s and early 1800s, which focused more on feeling and drama than on calm, classical balance.
Rodin came out of this environment, mixing old ideas with new approaches, and he brought that combination into his sculpture.
Dante wrote The Divine Comedy in the late 1200s, just before the year 1300. In 19th-century France, there was renewed interest in his work. People began reading Dante again, especially his Inferno, as part of a larger return to classical literature. This was tied to the way schools and artists were focusing on older texts as sources of inspiration.
One of the stories in Inferno, found in Canto 33, was especially well-known. It’s about Count Ugolino, a man from Pisa who was involved in political struggles between two rival groups, the Guelphs and the Ghibellines. Ugolino was arrested by his enemies and locked in a tower with his sons and grandsons. All of them starved to death. According to Dante, Ugolino was so desperate that he may have eaten the bodies of his dead children to survive.
In Dante’s story, Ugolino appears deep in Hell, in a frozen region where traitors are punished. He is shown gnawing on the head of Archbishop Ruggieri, the man who betrayed him. The text includes a scene where Ugolino’s children offer their bodies to him before they die, thinking he is biting his own hands out of hunger.
This moment from Inferno shows up in Rodin’s sculpture Ugolino and His Sons. The figures are twisted and muscular, with a lot of tension in their bodies. The sculpture draws from older works like the Laocoön Group, a classical sculpture from ancient Rome, and from the style of Michelangelo, especially in the way the human body is carved with exaggerated movement and emotion.
Rodin, like many artists of his time, was influenced by Renaissance art and literature. He also looked closely at how earlier artists in Florence—like Michelangelo—handled mythological and religious subjects. These influences shaped the way Rodin approached form and storytelling in his sculptures.
One more thing to keep in mind: Dante was one of the first major poets to write in vernacular Italian—the everyday language spoken by people in Florence. Before him, most serious literature was written in Latin. His descriptions of Hell, Heaven, and Purgatory weren’t taken from the Bible, but a lot of people over time confused them with religious doctrine. His work helped shape how later artists and writers thought about these ideas, and in the 1800s, that influence came back into focus again, especially in France, where classical and romantic education overlapped.
Rodin exhibited one of his first major sculptures at the Salon in 1877 when he was thirty-six. The piece was originally titled The Vanquished. It’s often connected to themes of war and possibly to events from the Franco-Prussian War, which had ended a few years earlier in 1871. Later, Rodin renamed it The Age of Bronze. When it was shown, critics accused him of using moulage, a French term for body casting. That meant they thought he had made the sculpture by directly casting a live model’s body instead of sculpting it by hand.
Rodin denied this and brought in the model he had used—Auguste Neyt, a Belgian soldier—as proof. He also showed photographs of Neyt to demonstrate that the sculpture was based on close observation, not casting. Some reports even say the model posed nude next to the sculpture during the controversy.
The sculpture shows a nude male figure in a relaxed stance with one arm raised. It shares visual qualities with ancient Greek works, especially the Doryphoros by Polykleitos, known for its contrapposto pose. It also has features similar to Hellenistic sculptures and even the work of Praxiteles. But after the controversy, Rodin seemed to shift direction. He began moving away from classical polish, possibly to avoid being accused of simply copying the old masters or being too skilled in a traditional way.
One of the clearest examples of this change is Saint John the Baptist Preaching. Rodin made it soon after The Age of Bronze. The sculpture shows John in a rough, muscular form, walking forward with one arm raised. He’s not posed in a standard contrapposto stance. His feet are planted wide apart, and there’s a twist to his body that doesn’t follow classical balance.
Critics at the time commented on how unusual the pose was. They asked whether the figure was walking or standing still. His arms and body don’t match standard poses from earlier sculpture. Rodin was likely trying to create a feeling of movement, something closer to what we see in late Hellenistic art. The surface of the bronze is rough, with deep shadows and raised textures. This kind of surface treatment catches the light in small patches and hollows. While Rodin wasn’t part of the Impressionist movement, the way his surfaces interact with light feels similar to how Impressionist painters used visible brushstrokes to show light and movement.
Rodin also exaggerated parts of the body. Hands and feet are often larger than normal. The eyes are deeply carved, and noses may be a bit oversized. These distortions aren’t realistic, but they add to the energy and presence of the figure.
Later in his career, Rodin returned to this sculpture. About twenty years after making Saint John the Baptist, he re-used the same pose in a different work. He removed the arms and head, roughened the surface even more, and cast it in a rougher version. This practice of reworking earlier figures was common for Rodin. He often recycled elements, making new versions that were more abstract.
This kind of reduction—removing parts and focusing on the shape and gesture—lines up with ideas that were beginning to appear in early 20th-century modernism. Around this time, artists like Picasso were simplifying forms and exploring abstraction. Rodin said he was trying to give only the essence of the sculpture. Antique sculpture fragments may have influenced this approach, as broken statues from ancient times were often admired for their form and texture.
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