Michelangelo and Rodin Rendezvous at the Louvre To Celebrate the Human Body in Stone and Chalk

PARIS — “Michelangelo Rodin: Living Bodies,” the new show at the Louvre in collaboration with the Musée Rodin, unites at the world’s most popular art museum two sorcerers of surfacing skin in stone. Never before have the two artists, separated by some four centuries, been put cheek to marbled jowl. Il Divino’s rests “Pietà,” “David,” and “Moses” have not made the journey to the City of Light. A helping of Michelangelo’s drawings, though, ravishes.There is no such shortage of sculptures by Rodin, here or elsewhere. While he and Michelangelo both worked in marble, the Louvre notes that their methods could not have been more different. Michelangelo, who considered himself primarily a sculptor despite such achievements as the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the Last Judgment, liberated his figures from slabs. Rodin’s team of assistants translated his models into stone.Rodin learned from Michelangelo — who was himself indebted to the great sculptors of antiquity — the technique of “non-finito.” This style, from the Italian for “unfinished,” emphasizes the contrast between the polished figures and the rough and unhewn marble. All the twisting, bending, and straining was meant to highlight the grappling between perfection and the unformed void. The visions, Michelangelo reckoned, were lurking under the veins.The Louvre holds two stellar instances of non-finito work from the High Renaissance master, the “Rebellious Slave” and the “Dying Slave,” both completed for the tomb of Pope Julian II. That Bishop of Rome was called the Il Papa Terribile — the “Warrior Pope.” In addition to his martial exploits in the Italian Wars he also commissioned Michelangelo and Raphael, organized the Swiss Guards, refurbished St. Peter’s, and founded the Vatican Museums. ‘L’âge d’airain’ by Auguste Rodin, 1876. Detail. Christian Baraja for Musée RodinRodin wrote to his assistant in 1907 that his “liberation from academicism took place through Michelangelo.” The Louvre gathers 200 objects to turn up the volume on what it calls the two artists’ “dialogue across the centuries.” Nearly all of these works, it must be said, depict men. The modernist sculptor Constance Brancusi, who worked for Rodin, disparaged the master’s style as “beefsteak run amok.” Brancusi has a “Female Torso” here.Visitors with a taste for the monumental are well served by the juxtaposition of a cast of Michelangelo’s “Moses” — the lawgiver with a flowing beard and horns — and Rodin’s “Monument to Balzac.” Rodin agonized over his sculpture of the French author, a commission from the Société des Gens de Lettres, for seven years. Panned in his own time, it is now seen as a landmark. His “Hand of God” is an allusion to both the Almighty and Il Divino.Rodin, who was born in 1840, traveled to Italy in 1876, just a year after the city celebrated the 400th anniversary of Michelangelo’s birth. He studied the Florentine closely, and in 1905 he told another sculptor that “Michelangelo called me to Italy and there I received precious insights which I took into my spirit and into my work before I even understood what it was about.” He told his longtime lover, Rose Beuret, with respect to Michelangelo that “the great magician is going to give me some of his secrets.”Even Rodin, though, suffers in comparison with the Florentine. The art critic Gilles Néret, calls Michelangelo’s body of work “a triumph which has no equivalent in the history of art —a unique phenomenon, which has bred no heirs.” That genius — what Michelangelo called the “rugged, white-hot lava” of his work —is present in this show in his chalk drawings. “Etudes pour la figure de David” shows the titanic Psalmist in embryonic form.“Homme nu, vu de face” features a man striding forward with such force that it seems like he could walk right off the page and into the gallery. The twist of the torso demonstrates that Michelangelo knew the length of ligaments and how muscles move. Like his contemporary Leonardo da Vinci — the two titans were competitors who craved the same patrons — Michelangelo secretly dissected cadavers to ensure his art followed life.‘Adam et Ève chassés du jardin d’Éden, d’après Masaccio,’ by Michaelangelo Buonarroti, 1504. Michael Urtado for Musée du LouvreEven Michelangelo, though, had to learn his paces from his predecessors. The show features a sketch that is a study of crestfallen Adam and Eve expelled from Paradise, originally by Masacchio. The fresco is seen as a leavetaking to medieval art. Eve’s howling despair can almost be heard through the chalk. So indelible did Michelangelo find this rendition of Eden, which he would have stood before in his youth, that it haunts his Sistine ceiling. All in all, “Living Bodies” is a breath of fresh air after a generation of ultra modern art. It reminds how extraordinary is the art of drawing and sculpting humans in their actual form rather than through the scrim of abstraction. That pursuit is, as Michelangelo and Rodin both would have said, non-finito. In Michelangelo’s old age — he lived to the age of 88, sculpting to the end — he named his Muse: The “sustaining splendor of beauty.”

Michelangelo and Rodin Rendezvous at the Louvre To Celebrate the Human Body in Stone and Chalk

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