Rodin Works: Damned Women, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, Desire |
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The poet Charles Baudelaire, who greatly influenced and inspired Rodin with his 'Fleurs du mal', wrote the following lines about the unsatiable lust of the femmes damnées: You that in your hell my soul pursues,
'The Metamorphoses of Ovid' (ca. 1884) is another
denomination for
the same presentation of female homosexuality, now ennobled by the
reference to the great Roman poet, who had deplored the decadence
following mankind's 'Golden Age', and - in this
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We
find an early version the 'Damned Women' on the right pilaster of
'The Gates of Hell', embracing each other with lesbian passion - which by
the time of Dante as well as during Rodin's life was generally
considered a capital sin, or at least a severe psycho-social aberration.
Rodin worked out the subject in several variations - in
fact, all the women populating the crowded tympanum were damned in one way
or another, so that 
