Acropolis now

‘My Acropolis,’ Auguste Rodin called his house at Meudon. Here, the sculptor made a Parthenon above Paris. Surrounded by statues of ‘mutilated gods’, he cast himself as the Phidias of the age. His collection was part cabinet of curiosities, part charnel house. He bought Nile crocodiles and Peking ginger jars, painted sarcophagi and chipped red-figure vases. Crowded among his 6,000 Greek, Roman, Egyptian, Assyrian, Chinese and Japanese objects were his own plasters, bronzes and clay models: hands by the hundred, legs vast and trunkless, arms beckoning, fidgeting, reaching. Isadora Duncan set up her ‘Dionysian’ dance school nearby to teach Hellenic rhythms. In the catacombs of the Rodin Museum of Meudon today you feel it would take only a note or two on the panpipes to bring these eerie limbs to life.

In the summer, Rodin brought his satyrs and Venuses outdoors. They deserved to be seen in sunlight. If not under the blue skies of that ‘marvellous Hellenic setting’, then the variable weather of Île-de-France would do. He displayed figures ‘skyed’ high on columns with ornate capitals, inspired by the Naxian Sphinx from Delphi. He made delicate female figures in plaster to bathe in the bowls or perch on the lips of Greek calyx cups. At night Rodin showed his fragments by candles, the light flickering on headless bodies and bodiless heads, animating limbs and torsos returned from the underworld. ‘This is the hospital of the Olympians,’ Rodin joked, wrapping cracks, clumsy joins and imperfections in bandages. A leg, a hand, a head, a torso all’antica were ‘masterpieces’ in their own right. ‘Though broken, they are not dead;they are vibrant, and I make them allthe more vibrant by completing them in my mind.’

‘It’s like real flesh!’ Rodin told the critic Paul Gsell. ‘It was as if it had been petrified by kisses and caresses… Touching this torso one half-expected it to feel warm.’