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Titan 1

Maker (French, 1840-1917)
Date1879 - 1880 (original clay model, posthumously? cast in bronze)
MediumCast bronze
DimensionsHeight: 14 in. (35.6 cm)
Credit LineThe Joel Starrels, Jr. Memorial Collection
Object number1974.175
Object TypeSculpture
On View
Not on view
Like many sculptors in the West since the Renaissance, Auguste Rodin studied in Italy and found inspiration in the sculptural monuments of antiquity. The study of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures—along with the works of the sixteenth-century Renaissance master Michelangelo and later European sculptors influenced by classical ideals—featured prominently in the academic training of nineteenth-century art schools in France.

Rodin’s Titan I, which was produced shortly after the artist’s Italian sojourn, exhibits his classical training through its heroic nudity, in which individual motifs such as legs and torso may be compared to classical forms. Rodin perhaps had in mind a famous first century B.C.E. Hellenistic marble statue—the Belvedere Torso—recovered in the fifteenth century and preserved in Rome. This fragmentary male nude had exerted an equally profound impact on Michelangelo, whose marble carvings and fresco paintings the young Rodin had studied in 1875, while residing in Florence and Rome. Even the title of the work evokes a classical past―the Titans were a mythic race of giants in Greek lore.
Nude Female Figure
Auguste Rodin
mid- 1880s or late 1890s (model)
The Juggler
Auguste Rodin
1892 - 1895 or 1909 (model); 1956 (Musee Rodin cast)
Despair, also titled Small Despair (Woman Seated with Her Foot in the Air)
Auguste Rodin
early 1880s or circa 1890 (model, Musee Rodin cast 1956)
Small Standing Torso
Auguste Rodin
1882 (model), Musee Rodin cast 1958
Reclining Figure (Study for Danaid?)
Auguste Rodin
circa 1885 (model, Musee Rodin cast 1959)
Clenched Hand (Study for The Mighty Hand?)
Auguste Rodin
circa 1884 - 1885 (model, Musee Rodin cast 1959)
The Cathedral
Auguste Rodin
1908 (model)
Head of Pierre de Wiessant (Type A)
Auguste Rodin
circa 1885 - 1886 (model, cast circa 1910 - 1911)
Female Nude
Auguste Rodin
circa 1896