The Gates of Hell

Why Rodin made a doorway to Hell

In 1880, the French state commissioned François-Auguste-René Rodin, known as Auguste Rodin, to make a monumental entrance for a planned Museum of Decorative Arts. The museum was supposed to rise on the burned site of the former Cour des Comptes. The building was never completed; the Gare d'Orsay and later the Musée d'Orsay eventually occupied the site.

The commission called for reliefs based on Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy. Rodin concentrated on Inferno, the poem's journey through Hell. He also looked to Lorenzo Ghiberti's fifteenth-century bronze doors for the Florence Baptistery, but he did not copy their orderly panels. Rodin turned the whole surface into one continuous field of falling, twisting, and repeated bodies.

How closely does it follow Dante's Inferno?

Dante supplies the basic setting and several identifiable stories, but the Gates are not a scene-by-scene illustration of the poem. The Thinker began as Dante. The Three Shades point toward the warning at Hell's entrance. Ugolino crawls over his dying children, and Paolo and Francesca appear among the falling bodies.

Rodin kept changing the arrangement, reused the same body in different positions, and added figures whose identities are not fixed by Dante. The result is better understood as Rodin's visual response to Inferno: a world of desire, violence, fear, and physical collapse, built from literary characters and newly invented bodies.

The famous sculptures that came out of the Gates

The Gates became a working source for Rodin's career. He removed figures and groups, enlarged or reduced them, changed their titles, and exhibited or cast them as independent sculptures. The Thinker is the best-known example: the small poet above the doors became a monumental public figure associated with thought itself.

The Three Shades also became an independent group. Rodin made it by repeating one figure three times and rotating the bodies toward the same point. Ugolino and His Children moved from a prominent place on the doors into freestanding versions. Fugit Amor and several other groups followed the same path. This reuse was not an afterthought; recombining existing forms became central to Rodin's method.

Was The Kiss part of The Gates of Hell?

Yes, but not in the final arrangement. Rodin first placed Paolo and Francesca—the lovers killed by Francesca's husband in Dante's Inferno—on the left door. He removed the embracing couple in 1886 because their moment of happiness did not fit the surrounding scene of punishment.

The group was exhibited separately in 1887 under the title Francesca da Rimini and later became known as The Kiss. A different Paolo and Francesca group remained on the Gates, where the lovers cling to one another while falling. The two versions answer different moments in the story: the independent sculpture shows desire before the murder; the Gates show the lovers in Hell.

Did Rodin ever finish The Gates of Hell?

There is no simple yes-or-no answer. Rodin developed the project intensely during the 1880s and stopped sustained work around 1890, but he returned to it and continued changing individual elements. In 1900 he displayed a plaster version at his Paris retrospective. It was deliberately fragmentary: he left off many of the figures that projected furthest from the background because he felt the contrast was too strong.

In 1917, Léonce Bénédite, the first curator of the future Musée Rodin, persuaded Rodin to authorize a reconstruction for bronze casting. Rodin died that November before seeing a bronze Gates. The Musée Rodin's garden cast was made by the Alexis Rudier foundry in 1928. It is an authorized posthumous bronze based on the reconstructed plaster, not an object Rodin personally inspected in metal.

How large are The Gates of Hell?

The Musée Rodin bronze is 6.35 metres high, 4 metres wide, and 85 centimetres deep—about 20 feet 10 inches by 13 feet 1 inch. The 1917 plaster at the Musée d'Orsay has the same height and width and is recorded as 94 centimetres deep. Without The Three Shades at the top, the plaster is 5.2 metres high.

The scale matters because many photographs make the work look like an ordinary pair of doors. A standing visitor reaches only partway up the lower panels. The figures range from small bodies embedded in shallow relief to groups that project forcefully into the viewer's space.

Where is the original, and why are there several versions?

The state commission produced a long-changing plaster model, not one bronze completed during Rodin's life. The 1917 plaster now shown at the Musée d'Orsay is closely tied to that commission. The bronze in the Musée Rodin garden was cast in 1928 from the reconstructed model. Other authorized bronze casts were made later for museum collections outside France.

Calling only one version 'the original' hides how Rodin worked. He modelled in clay and plaster, assistants helped enlarge and assemble forms, and foundries translated approved models into bronze. The useful questions are which material, which assembly, which cast date, and which institution a label describes.

Where to see The Gates of Hell in Paris

The best-known Paris bronze stands in the sculpture garden of the Musée Rodin at the Hôtel Biron. The museum identifies it as inventory S.01304 and a 1928 Alexis Rudier cast. Because museums lend works and change access routes, check the live object page before planning a visit around it.

The full-size 1917 plaster is at the Musée d'Orsay. That placement has an unusual historical logic: the Orsay site is where the planned Museum of Decorative Arts was supposed to stand. The sculpture finally reached the location connected with its original commission, although it functions as an artwork inside a museum rather than as an opening door.

More by Auguste Rodin

Sculpture · Modern sculptureThe Thinker1880; enlarged 1903–1904