The Age of Bronze

Which cast this is

The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds the bronze pictured above, accession 07.127. The museum dates the model to 1876 and the cast to about 1906. The Alexis Rudier foundry made that cast. Mrs. John W. Simpson gave the bronze to the museum in 1907. The cast stands 182.9 centimetres high and weighs 124.7 kilograms.

That cast was poured while Auguste Rodin was alive, so it is a lifetime cast rather than one of the posthumous bronzes elsewhere. The Musée Rodin's own version, inventory S.986, was cast by the Alexis Rudier foundry before 1941 and measures 180.5 by 68.5 by 54.5 centimetres. Auguste Rodin died in 1917, so the Paris bronze is a later edition.

The Cleveland Museum of Art's bronze, 1918.328, has a documented origin of its own. The museum states that its trustee Ralph King commissioned the cast from Auguste Rodin in 1916, and that Rodin personally supervised the casting. Rodin finished it with his favourite patina, a deep reddish tone he called crushed grape.

Three museums, three dates for the model

The holding institutions do not agree on when the figure was modelled. The Cleveland Museum of Art dates it 1875–76. The Metropolitan Museum of Art says 1876. The Musée Rodin gives a date of conception of 1877, the year the figure was first exhibited.

The spread is small but it is real, and it reflects a work made over a stretch of months in Brussels rather than finished on a single day. Where the difference matters, the safe form is to name the museum along with the date.

The spear that was taken away

The raised left hand once held a spear. The Musée Rodin records that the weapon appears in a photograph of the sculpture by Gaudenzio Marconi. Auguste Rodin then decided to suppress the spear, so as to free the arm of any attribute.

Removing the spear removed the subject. With a weapon, the figure is a soldier or a warrior and the raised arm has a job. Without the weapon, the Cleveland Museum of Art writes, Auguste Rodin stripped the sculpture of narrative symbols and focused on the male nude itself.

The hand kept the shape the spear had given it. The fingers still close around a shaft that is no longer there, and the gap they leave is visible in the bronze.

The accusation of casting from a living model

Auguste Rodin exhibited the figure without a title at the Cercle Artistique in Brussels in 1877, then sent it to the Salon in Paris. The Musée Rodin says the figure caused a scandal there. Critics claimed the modelling was too exact to have been made by hand, and that Rodin had taken a mould from his living model.

The charge was serious. Casting from life counted as mechanical reproduction rather than sculpture, and the charge would have disqualified the work as art. Rodin had to prove, in the Musée Rodin's words, that the quality of his sculpture's modelling came from a thorough study of profiles and not from a life cast.

He was cleared. The Musée Rodin records that his critics eventually recognised that the sculptor was innocent of any trickery, and the Cleveland Museum of Art calls the accusation false. The Musée Rodin also notes one result of the affair: the scandal drew attention to Auguste Rodin and earned him the commission for The Gates of Hell in 1880.

Auguste Ney, the model

The Musée Rodin names the model as Auguste Ney, a young Belgian soldier. Rodin was living and working in Brussels at the time, and the figure is the first life-size sculpture of his that survives, according to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The soldier's identity does not enter the sculpture. The figure has no uniform, no weapon in the finished bronze and no attribute of rank. The accusation of 1877 objected to precisely that closeness between the bronze and the man who stood for it.

The surface, and why it carries the argument

Auguste Rodin's defence rested on modelling, so the surface of the bronze carries his case. The skin over the ribs, the hollow of the flank and the tendons at the neck are described separately rather than smoothed into one another. Light breaks differently on each passage.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's cast carries a dark brown patina with heavy olive-green mottling across the chest, the raised arm and the thighs. Where the form projects, the patina is rubbed back to a paler grey. The hollows hold the green patina.

Small round pits and raised blisters are scattered over the chest and ribs. They belong to the metal rather than to the body, and they are one way a viewer can tell a bronze surface from the clay it was taken from.

The titles it has carried

The sculpture went unnamed at Brussels in 1877. The Musée Rodin records two other titles the sculpture has carried, The Awakening Man and The Vanquished One. The museum says the title now in use recalls one of the early ages of mankind.

Each title pulls the figure a different way. An awakening man is coming to consciousness, and a vanquished one has been beaten. The bronze supports both readings because Auguste Rodin took away the object that would have settled the question.

How many Age of Bronze casts exist

No single answer covers every version. Bronzes were cast in Rodin's lifetime and after it, and casts exist in reduced sizes as well as at full height. The Metropolitan Museum of Art alone holds more than one version of the subject.

For casts made after his death, the Musée Rodin publishes the rule it works to. As Auguste Rodin's beneficiary the museum holds his intellectual property rights and oversees casting from the original models and molds in his bequest. It limits the number of bronzes cast from an original work to twelve, and two committees of sculpture experts must validate each project.

Where it sits in Rodin's working life

The Age of Bronze precedes the studio Auguste Rodin is best known for. Camille Claudel, who worked beside him as student and assistant, entered his studio in 1882, several years after the Brussels figure was finished and exhibited.

The Gates of Hell followed in 1880, and The Burghers of Calais in 1884. Both were large commissions with assistants and subcontracted labour behind them. The Age of Bronze was made before any of that, by a sculptor in his mid-thirties with no public reputation to protect.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

A Metropolitan Museum of Art studio plate of the museum's cast 07.127, taken from directly in front against a plain grey backdrop. The whole figure is in frame from the crown of the head to the bronze slab under the feet. The back of the sculpture is not visible at all, and Auguste Rodin worked it as hard as the front.