The Thinker
Encyclopedia : T : TH : THE : The Thinker
"The Thinker" (French: "Le Penseur") is one of Auguste Rodin's famous bronze sculptures. It depicts a man in sober meditation battling with a powerful internal struggle. It's sometimes used to represent philosophy.
Sculpture
Originally named "The Poet", the piece was part of a commission by the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, to create a monumental portal based on The Divine Comedy of Dante. Each of the statues in the piece represented one of the main characters in the epic poem. "The Thinker" was originally meant to depict Dante in front of the Gates of Hell, pondering his great poem. The sculpture is naked, as Rodin wanted a heroic figure in the tradition of Michelangelo, to represent intellect as well as poetry.Rodin made a first small plaster version around 1880.
The first large-scale bronze cast was finished in 1902, but was not presented to the public until 1904. It became the property of the city of Paris, thanks to a subscription organised by Rodin admirers, and was put in front of the Panthéon in 1906. In 1922, however, it was moved to the Hôtel Biron, transformed into a Rodin Museum.
More than any other Rodin sculpture, The Thinker moved into the popular imagination, as an immediately recognizable icon of intellectual activity; consequently it has been subject to endless satirical use.
The original cast is currently on tour in Hartford, Connecticut at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, Mar/Apr 2006.
Further casts
Over twenty casts of the sculpture are in museums around the world. Some of these copies are enlarged versions of the original work as well as sculptures of different scales.Monumental casts
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Detroit Institute of Arts
- Laeken cemetery, near Brussels, Belgium
- Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri
- Kyoto National Museum
See also
External links
- The [Thinker project], Munich. Discussion of the history of the many casts of this artwork.
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.