EVE

EVE (MEDIUM)

Plaster*  - Height cm. 76 ( 29 7/8 ")

Rodin spent several weeks in Florence on his trip to Italy. While there he visited the Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria Novella, where he saw Masaccio’s fresco of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden of Eden. Later in Rome, Rodin spent days in the Sistine Chapel looking at the frescoes in which Michelangelo painted a similar scene. These compositions, the most famous versions of the subject in Western art, were Rodin’s starting point for Eve. These Renaissance sources provided Rodin with a profundity missing from the series of chaste, coy Eves that had appeared in the Salons after 1850.
 Rodin began the figure shortly after he received the commission for The Gates of Hell. (Eve, with Adam, was originally intended as a life-size figure flanking the Gates.) The legs and lower torso of Eve recall those features of Masaccio’s figure, and if the treatment of the upper body began with Michelangelo’s figure, the final arrangement is original to Rodin. The gentle S-curve of the pose, the arms crossed over the breast, and the gravity of the downcast head are developed through a broad modeling, which includes numerous nicks and slips of the sculpting tools.