You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett Read Free Book Online Page B

built around their labor. Sculpting was Rodin’s job; Rodin was hers. She became his best studio assistant, posing for him in the mornings, then returning again at night to cover the unfired mounds of clay with damp rags to keep them from drying out. She continued working as a seamstress on the side and, every once in a while, Rodin helped her sew buttons.
    Rodin was loath to admit how much he depended on Beuret. When asked about their relationship he would say with a shrug, “It is necessary to have a woman.” But he didn’t believe a man needed a wife, so when she gave birth to their son out of wedlock in 1866 the boy’s birth certificateread Auguste-Eugène Beuret, father “unknown.” Nonetheless, they remained together for the rest of their lives, with Beuret acting as Rodin’s chief adviser, partner, lover and, ultimately, the sustainer of his gift.
    RODIN WENT TO GALLERIES as an observer over the next decade. Eleven years had passed since the Paris Salon rejected his Man with the Broken Nose , and he had not submitted another work since. Sensing that an artist could stake a career on a single statue, he was determined to return only when he had realized a masterpiece.
    He was confident in his technical abilities, but unsure of how to synthesize his miscellaneous education into a proper life-sculpting practice. Lecoq had taught him the rules of attention; Barye taught him movement; but still no one had taught him the human form. So, in 1875, he went to Italy to learn straight from the source: Michelangelo.
    He packed a bag with French sausage so he wouldn’t have to eat the seemingly iron-deficient Italian cuisine, and then boarded a train. He took the scenic route, passing through France and Belgium to see the Gothic cathedrals along the way. “Dinant is picturesque, but Reims, its cathedral, is of a beauty I have not yet encountered in Italy,” he wrote to Beuret.
    All of Florence was celebrating Michelangelo’s four hundredth birthday when Rodin arrived that winter. He visited the Medici Chapel, where Michelangelo’s statue of Lorenzo de Medici sat in a contemplative pose much like The Thinker would. He went on to examine the contours of every Michelangelo figure he could find in Florence before traveling on to Rome to see the paintings at the Sistine Chapel. The experience totally destabilized Rodin. Every decision Michelangelo made seemed to run counter to what Rodin had learned from the Greek artists at the Louvre. “ ‘Hold on!’ I said to myself, ‘why this incurving of the body? Why this hip raised, this shoulder lowered?’ ” Yet he knew Michelangelo would not have miscalculated.
    Now that he was a student again, Rodin re-created Lecoq’s old exercises, filling his notebooks with sketches “not directly of his works,but of their scaffolding; the system I’m building in my imagination in order to understand him,” he wrote to Beuret. Gradually, “the great magician is letting me in on some of his secrets.”
    When Rodin returned home a month later, he was brimming with ideas. He set to work at once on the statue that would finally win him entrée into the salons. He found his model in a young Belgian soldier with a graceful musculature. The man posed with one fist clutching a spear-like rod, the other hand raised to his head as if in distress. Rodin examined his form obsessively, from the front, back and sides, then in three-quarter profiles. He climbed up a painter’s ladder to capture the view from above, then crouched on the floor to look from below. He spent three months on one leg, and altogether a year and a half modeling each successive contour inch by inch.
    The result was an uncannily realistic plaster man, which Rodin titled The Age of Bronze . His eyes half closed, this was someone who had seen something terrible, as if he had just come upon the slain body of his lover, or as if he realized that