Titan 1

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.