Michelangelo and Rodin. Living Bodies

Auguste Rodin, Adam, modeled 1880 or 1881, cast 1910, Musée Rodin, Paris.

Michelangelo and Rodin, in making the body the central subject of their artworks, showed that they both perceived it as animated by an intense inner life.

Michelangelo and Rodin, two unrivalled masters of Western sculpture, engage in a dialogue across the centuries. Their works, emblematic of the strength of the body and the depth of the soul, are here brought together for the first time, revealing a continuum between the two artists, marked by clear divisions.

Organised into five sections – Two Legendary Artists; Nature and Antiquity: Reinventing the Model; Non Finito; Bodies and Souls; and Energy and Life –, the exhibition associates marble, bronze, plaster, terracotta and cast works with a rich pictorial production. The exhibition route highlights the issues of form and concept that drove the same ambition in both artists: to make manifest the body’s inner energy.

The body is thus revealed as the membrane that envelops the soul, a living thing weathering time and movement. We also explore the historic uses of motion in sculpture: how did the reinvention of antiquity and the ways bodies were used foreshadow the divisions of the 20th century? Calling attention to the connections, borrowings and reinterpretations to be found in the works of Michelangelo and Rodin, the exhibition gives a close reading of the myths surrounding these two masters and proposes a new perspective on sculpture not as the making of forms, but as a laboratory for breaking new artistic ground.