Very little time is apt
to play havoc with such classification. I mean only to indicate that the
resemblance to Michael Angelo, found by so many persons in such works as
the Dante doors, is only of the loosest kind--as one might, through
their common lusciousness, compare peaches with pomegranates--and that
to the discerning eye, or the eye at all experienced in observing
sculpture, M. Rodin's sculpture is far more closely related to that of
Donatello and the Greeks. It, too, reveals rather than constructs
beauty, and by the expression of character rather than by the suggestion
of sentiment.
An illustration of M. Rodin's affinity with the antique is an incident
which he related to me of his work upon his superb "Age d'Airain." He
was in Naples; he saw nature in freer inadvertence than she allows
elsewhere; he had the best of models. Under these favoring circumstances
he spent three months on a leg of his statue; "which is equivalent to
saying that I had at last absolutely mastered it," said he. One day in
the Museo Nazionale he noticed in an antique the result of all his study
and research.
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