~ The Abandon by Camille Claudel

I hope you all have the opportunity to hold someone you love in your arms, perhaps while enjoying a dance or simply by embracing the peson you hold dear and saying: "I love you" before they are gone from your heart and life.

These were the very words that Camille Claudel never heard spoken from the lips of her love, Auguste Rodin, and which tortured her existence to her dying day.

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In honor of St. Valentine's, I post Rodin's most famous sculpture and monument to love. Blending sensuality and idyllic love Rodin created one of the greatest images of love based on his own love for the young Camille, whom he often called his own muse.

It is based on Virgil and Dante's visit through hell, "The Inferno". While there they saw, among those who had committed sins of the flesh, Paolo and Francesca, two individuals who had lived in the Middle Ages in Italy.

Around 1275, Francesca married Gianciotto Malatesta, Lord of Rimini. He entrusted her in to the care of his brother, the handsome young Paolo. It is said that Paolo and Francesca fell in love with each other while reading romances of courtly love. Rodin portrays them in the moment after having read the tragic story of Lancelot and Guinevere. As they realize their love for one another, Rodin captures what must have been their first kiss shortly before they are killed.

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Another of my favorite sculptures by Rodin. In this piece, Rodin shows how God moulds the human form from matter bringing the divinity into humanity from emptiness. It is also a supposed to represent a parallel symbolic image of the artist who both invents and sculpts a world from raw material.

"The Hand of God" is molding clay with the forms of Adam and Eve intermingled together, powerfully molding the matter from which two newborn creatures emerge from the divine; it is also a symbolic image of the artist who creates a world from an insipred vision.

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The Danaid represents the suffering of one of the daughters of Danaus, King of Argos. In the Greek myth, Danaid was condemned to live in Hades for eternity, perpetually filling a vessel full of holes as punishment for the murder of her husband. In this sculputure Rodin captures the moment where she has thrown herself down, beside the stream, in despairing abandon at the futility of her life.

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