Bernini, Apollo and Daphne
The Apollo and Daphne was executed almost simultaneously with the David. Upon entering the room from either of its two doors, the spectator’s first encounter with the sculpture would have been a most unexpected, indeed, a very surprising rear view of Apollo’s body.
By means of the dynamic thrust of Apollo’s body, Bernini guides us towards ever-rich sculptural details and an increasingly interesting narrative. The rising arc of Daphne’s long legs and torso directs our attention to her face and hands: we see her cry out and find that her fingers have changed to leaves. It is from this point of view that Apollo gains our sympathy, for we see his hand feel “the trembling spirit” beneath the bark and notice too that most poignant sense of loss has registered on his face.
The fable of Apollo and Daphne is disclosed then not in one dramatic vision but gradually and sequentially as one moves around the statue.
Canova, Tomb of Maria Christina
As with his earlier tombs, Canova took great pains to detach the monument to Maria Christina from the surrounding church in order to give it an independent space and independent meaning.
The dissociation of tomb and church is emphasized by all sorts of details. For one thing, Canova is careful to show us the pyramid as an actual building by differentiating the individual blocks of which it is composed… still more important, the gaping entrance to the pyramid is totally at odds with the wall against which the monument is set. The darkness of the door suggests an endless space, yet this impression is flatly contradicted by the shallow distance from the face of the pyramid to the wall behind it. In all respects we are made to think of this tomb as a reality in its own right and not as an accessory of the church.
The highly articulated rhythms, the perfect cadence of each drapery fold are suddenly and terrifyingly contrasted with the amorphous, impenetrable darkness of the gaping grave. Never had white marble been used more effectively to symbolize the radiant light of life. Never before has darkness been used a as dramatic protagonist, as a distinct and expressive substance in its own right.
As a consequence of the new vision of death, which is no longer considered a passage to life everlasting but a darkness about which the artist says nothing, the preserve of the deceased is reduced to a small medallion held aloft by two genii fluttering over the door
Instead of addressing us, all his figures turn away from where we stand. There can be no audience for the spectacle of death as Canova has conceived it. There can only be participants in the endless procession towards the grave.
Man’s fate is endless. It is not to be apprehended with terrestrial logic. Nothing can be learned from it and no consolation is at hand.
Rodin by Leo Steinburg
Rodin’s intuition is of sculptural form in suspension. He finds bodies that coast and roll as if on air currents, that stay up like the moon, or bunch and disband under gravitational pressures.
He seeks to create, by implication, a space more energetic than the forms it holds in solution.
Rodin’s unbodied heads – the masks mounted off base, tipped and angled – they seem not poised but propelled, discharged into space by the abstracted energy of gesture alone.
In the human hand, Rodin discovered the only familiar existence which has no inversions, no backviews or atypical angles; which can never be seen upside down.
The point is not so much that Rodin puts his sculptures through these revolutions, but that they lend themselves to inversions, as most figurative sculpture, conceived to rest on a supporting base, does not.
What enlivens Rodin’s forms is not only the vibration of surface modeling and the quickened light, but the implication always of some pressure or spatial turbulence to which these forms are exposed
Many of his figures are precariously balanced or hoisted, many have to do with falling, and then figures that gaze into abysmal depths, as if the ground at their feet were a nether sky.
This evasive relationship to a supporting ground marks a good half of Rodin’s conceptions, his casual doodles, and even his failures, as much as his great, humble masterworks. They share the disturbed equilibrium, or the vain drift to find the void at its center.
And then the opposite: the monumental statues that stand planted and rooted. For these figures it is the fierce grip on the earth that becomes the whole enterprise. For his mature works depart in opposite directions from the common waking experience of equilibrium: they are either disturbed, unsettled, adrift; or else they hold the ground with rapacious tenacity, as if they would lose their limbs one by one, rather than loosen their grip. And both of these extremes share in the power of suggesting that the surrounding emptiness is energetic.
Rodin’s implied space equips sculpture in three distinct ways for the modern experience.
Psychologically, it supplies a threat of imbalance which serves like a passport to the age of anxiety. Physically, it suggests a world in which voids and solids interact as modes of energy. And semantically, by never ceasing to ask where and how his sculptures can possibly stand, where in space they shall loom or balance, refusing to take for granted even the solid ground, Rodin unsettles the obvious and brings to sculpture that anxious questioning for survival without which no spiritual activity enters this century.
The singleness of man’s body allotment succumbs to three kinds of action – to multiplication, fragmentation, and random graft.
Multiplications are Rodin’s constant recourse, and if we do not know how they were prompted, we at least recognize the effect, which is always a redoubling of energy.
Multiplication generates new and more intricate rhythms of solids and intervals
Sometimes the duplications reflect Rodin’s avowed interest in expressing a succession of moments; for the repetition of identical or similar poses may suggest uninterrupted duration, or a single form evolving in time. What the sculpture gains is the potency of prolonged states.
What Rodin represents is not really a human body, but a body’s specific gesture, and he retains just so much of the anatomical core as that gesture needs to evolve
It is because of the comparative primacy given to movement, gesture, or act, that any unmoved part of the body becomes dispensable.
This principle of dispensability determines the limit of fragmentation. An anatomy can be stripped down so long as it yields a clear gesture. But the dispensability rule also hands us a criterion of judgment.
Energy – that excess flowing out at the fingertips, which drives some hands to drumming the table – kept him proliferating his race of figments till a thousand plasters lined and littered his ateliers.
No Rodin sculpture is known until it is known in its adaptability. Most of his works are constellations of interchangeable parts; and within his works are constellations of interchangeable parts; and within his enormous output you can play endlessly spotting the vagrants.
Rodin’s preferred material is bronze. But after the scandal aroused by the Age of Bronze, with its outright illusion of nakedness, his bronzes tended increasingly to forbid the analogy with smooth human flesh. Thenceforth, though they refer to humanity, they refer as intensely to the metal in its cold or heated state. Rodin’s modeling grows more emphatic, the leaps from elevation to trough become steeper, the transitions metal-edged.
Solid or molten – these are the modes of bronze and plaster, not those of flesh. Henceforth, Rodin’s best sculpture is about the materials of which it is made. It is also about the process of making them. In most of his subsequent works Rodin straddles the state of perfection by leaving them either unfinished or damaged.
Accident is one of Rodin’s resources for doubling the energy charge of his work. Breaks, cracks, and losses are violent. They imply the intractable and unforeseen, and that the artistic will drives its decisions against the brutal nonchalance of insensate matter.
For Rodin a work of art is no longer the sort of work that can be finished. It can only be abandoned, whether through distraction, discouragement, boredom, or competition calls.
In many of his late figurines, Rodin’s modeling blinds itself to external anatomy. His subtle acquaintance with human surface is set aside for a deepening, inward-turned acquiescence.
Accepting perfunctory surfaces and awkward limbs, they are oblivious of self and body, of style and beauty – to be only what the dance is.
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