Author
Auguste Rodin
Movement / period
Sculpture and Form
Medium
sculpture
Location
Musee Rodin, Paris
He ended up removing them from the Gates because the piece felt too lyrical, too hopeful — totally wrong for a scene of eternal punishment — and then exhibited it separately in 1887 to immediate public sensation.
Highlights
Facts & legends
- Rodin originally conceived The Kiss not as a standalone sculpture but as one of the condemned souls for his monumental Gates of Hell commission — the two figures were meant to be Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, caught in their sinful embrace just before damnation.
- He ended up removing them from the Gates because the piece felt too lyrical, too hopeful — totally wrong for a scene of eternal punishment — and then exhibited it separately in 1887 to immediate public sensation.
- When the life-size marble version toured to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, local authorities demanded it be screened off from public view because the nudity was deemed indecent — a crowd still gathered to peek anyway.
- The 1900 marble was kept for about a decade in a stable by the American collector Edward Perry Warren, who lived in Lewes, England — though he had actually asked Rodin to make the figures more explicit.
- The model for the female figure was Camille Claudel, Rodin's student, collaborator, and lover — which gives the sculpture a biographical charge that Rodin himself never confirmed publicly but also never denied.
- The man's hand rests on the woman's thigh but never quite grips it — that unresolved tension, touch without possession, was entirely deliberate and is what keeps the piece from tipping into sentimentality.
More details How Dante's doomed lovers proved too happy for The Gates of Hell, why the public renamed them, and why Rodin placed his “huge knick-knack” beside the scandalous Balzac.
Paolo and Francesca
Murder is already hidden in the kiss
Dante's lovers kiss while reading Lancelot and Guinevere, are discovered and killed by Francesca's husband, then swept forever through Hell.
Paolo still holds the book; Rodin shows the instant before catastrophe rather than punishment after it.
Born on the Gates of Hell
Rodin removed the couple for being too blissful
Designed around 1882 for the portal, the calm embrace contradicted its dark rhythm. In 1886 Rodin replaced it with a tormented version.
Exhibited independently in 1887, a rejected fragment became a masterpiece.
The public supplied the title
Nudity made a medieval story universal
Originally Francesca da Rimini, the group lacked costume or setting, so viewers called it The Kiss.
Her embrace is assured while his hand barely touches her thigh, preserving the hesitation of a first kiss.
Ten years for marble
A state commission enlarged the group
France ordered the marble in 1888; Rodin delivered and exhibited it only in 1898.
Polished bodies emerge from rough stone, making apparent incompletion part of the action.
A huge knick-knack
The accessible work protected the difficult Balzac
Rodin paired it with his rejected monument to Balzac in 1898 and jokingly called the popular marble a “huge knick-knack.”
It entered the Luxembourg Museum in 1901 and the Rodin Museum in 1919; its romance remains shadowed by the lovers' death.
Official sources
Where to check
- Official institution site Musee Rodin
- The Kiss: marble, commission and historyMusée Rodin
- Large model and Paolo and FrancescaMusée Rodin
Visual context
