Rodin Works: the three shades |
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"By assembling three casts of her, Rodin's wins for himself the painter's advantage. The margins become engaged intervalls, so that the repeat of this one irregular body yields infinite rhythmic amplifications." In her essay 'Rodin's Gates of Hell: Sculptural illustration of Dante's Divine Comedy' Aida Audeh, however, points to Canto XVI as the literary source of 'The Shades' and their threefold appearance on top of 'The Gates'. In this part of the poem, Dante meets the souls of three Florentine men condemned for the act of sodomy. The punished figures are exposed to a rain of fire and in incessant motion while trying to avoid the scorching heat. In 1887 Cosmo Monkhouse interpreted 'The Three Shades' as a personification of the first three lines of the inscription over the door of Dante's Hell: "The Gate of Despair ... The lintel is surmonted by a
group of three nude, emaciated, and miserable figures, the plastic
translation of the first three lines of the well-known inscription over
the door of Dante's hell:
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As
a variation of 'Adam' with a less distorted attitude, Rodin executed 'The
Shades': a triple representation of the same figure, mounted at the top of
the 'Gates of Hell'. With their left hands they show down and direct the
eyes of the viewer to
inevitability of fate, echoeing mythological tales like that of the Greek
Moirae (Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos). Lampert attributes this repitition
to Rodin's intention to reach a more haunting effect and refers to Leo
Steinberg, who interpreted Rodin's obsession with repeating forms and
patterns as a foreboding of modern painting. Commenting on the 'Three
Faunesses', Steinberg wrote:
